SmarteSoft

Face it, occasionally there is an object — or a group of objects — that gives fits to your automation project. Often, it goes like this: We testers need to select an item based on its text, and, much to our frustration, it’s embedded in an image — or we are faced with a large tree containing thousands of items that change regularly.  Typically, these things are barriers to automation. Enter Optical Character Recognition (OCR). With it, the computer can “read” whatever is on the screen, wherever it is. It performs this task by looking at the image and matching what it sees to a database of known options.

With SmarteScript, you can build a database of options on install. This may take a few moments but will improve your chances of accurately recognizing characters and words. If your application uses a font that is not installed locally, we would recommend installing the font and re-building the database.  To do this, select tools>options>utilities settings. Once there, click on the OCR database setup option. Again this may take some time but it is well worth the effort.

Occasionally we need to tweak the OCR engine. This is accomplished by manually editing the textract.ini file located in the directors c:/program files/smartesoft/smartescript/bin. Within this file you will find several options — here are the areas for adjustment:

[Recognition]
Include1=* (this allows you to name specific fonts to be included in the database build, * allows all installed fonts to be built into database to the maximum number defined in this file)
Include2= (additional position for inclusion of font names, can be left blank with no ill effect)
Exclude= (specific fonts to exclute, i.e. dingbats)
Italic=0 (0 will exclude italic characters from the database, 1 will include italic characters)
Bold=0 (0 will exclude bold versions of fonts from inclusion in the database, 1 will include the bold versions of fonts)
Underlined=0 (0 will exclude underlined versions of fonts, 1 will include)
Sizes=8-12 (defines the size range, can be maxed to 6-72)
Multicolor=0 (setting this to 1 will improve the performance of OCR in multicolor environments, but it will be slightly slower)
Multifont=0 ( allows for the recognition of character strings that switch font)
Line align=10
MaxNFonts=256 (setting for the maximum number of fonts, increases database build time, i.e. 4000)
Database Preload=0( if set to 1 the entire database loads into memory, using resources but improving performance)
Flip=1 (allows the recognition of upside down characters when set to 1)
MaxDepth=1 (how many colors allowed in font, 1=b/w)

Tags: Optical Character Recognition, SmarteScript

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.