A method for translating printed documents using a hand-held device

Abstract

We have developed a system to translate and interpret printed documents (such as periodicals) using a commercially available mobile device (e.g., a mobile telephone) with an embedded camera. The system comprises an automatic layout analysis tool along with an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine and a translation engine. The translation engine combines Rule-Based Machine Translation (RBMT) software, a list of context-sensitive words/phrases, and an encyclopedia for a list of words. We implemented the proposed system on a Nokia N900 smartphone for translating newspaper articles from Spanish to English. Our tests show that the accuracy and speed of the system is mostly influenced by the accuracy and speed of the OCR method used. Our application requires 19.43 MB of memory and no more than 28 MB of dynamic memory. We show the ability to complete the process for roughly 410 words in as little as 65 seconds for high accuracy or 17 seconds for high speed, on average. The energy consumption in both cases is minimal.