"Sign Language": Translation software deciphers billboards and street signs
From: Technology Review - March 2003 - page 28
By: Chip Walter


In our global economy, the ability to understand languages other than one’s
native tongue grows more important every day. That is why Jie Yang, a
computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, and his colleagues have
created software that reads Chinese signs and quickly translates them into
English using nothing more than a palm-size computer equipped with a small
camera.  

"If you're trying to get somewhere, it helps to be able to understand the
signs around you," says Yang, who plans to develop translation modules for
Japanese, Arabic, and Korean if funding is available. "There's a growing
demand for products like this," he explains. 

The seemingly simple task of interpreting street signs actually represents a
bundle of problematic processes - from machine vision to character
recognition - with which researchers in computer science and artificial
intelligence have been struggling for years. Yang chose some of the most
promising software solutions and squeezed them into a handheld Pocket PC
device. His system starts by scanning an image for hard edges - a sign's
borders. Next, it searches for cues such as contrasting, similar-size
characters. Optical character recognition software "reads" the words, and
other algorithms cluster them into plausible groupings. 

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/innovation60303.asp