UbiTips      

7  ways  to  use  OCR  in  your  presenta5ons  

Optical Character Recognition is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo or from subtitle text superimposed on an image (for example from a television broadcast)

OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision.

What  is  OCR?  

Lecture capture, training recording and conference webcasting produce long videos.

For those who wish to review content and access precise information, search is the key. Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), UbiCast analyses captured presentation material and extracts the words out of all the slides to make them searchable.

- Works with any presentation material (PowerPoint, Keynote, PDFs, etc.)

- Easy access to the moment in the video when the slide containing the word is displayed

- Does not require the presenter to submit their presentation at any point in time

How  to  use  it  in  your  presenta5ons?

Here  some  5ps  to  op5mize  the  use  of  OCR  in  your  UbiCast  video  presenta5ons:

1.    Ensure  the  contrast  between  the  background  and  font

2.  Use  a  plain  background

Do not place images in the background. This could harm the character recognition for the software.

Here an example of bad practice.

3.  Keep  an  eye  the  resolu5on  and  image  size

The resolution of UbiCast stations and the one of the computers projecting the presentation should be the same to avoid black stripes

Ideally, the picture size is 4/3 or 16/9 .

An example of well analyzed slide by the UbiCast system:

A white background with black/ dark blue text and mainly classics fonts.

Thus here, on this slide, all the keywords were successfully extracted by OCR.

4.  Chose  classic  fonts

Optimize the recognition of your titles using a larger font size than the rest of the text.

When you select the "Title Placement" option in the "self- chapter" section, make sure that all your tracks are located in the same area on your slides .

Here, the title is framed in red.

5.  Highlight  the  5tle

6.  Use  the  Mul5language  op5on

UbiCast stations’OCR tools can analyze 8 languages.

To change the language you need to access the  « Advanced Parameters » from the home page. You will see two flags in the bottom bar.

Click and you will be able to choose between the 3 languages supported by our machines (German, English or French) and the 8 languages recognized by the OCR (German, English , Arabic, Spanish, French , Dutch, Italian and Suomi).

7.  Give  5tles  automa5cally  with  OCR

To use OCR in your UbiCast station, you have to access the "Publication" menu, choose the video you want to give titles automatically, then click on the chaptering tool.

You land in the menu you see here , than you can define a zone in which the machine will search for a title on each slide (the green arrow here).

Then, if you choose the (T) button the software automatically creates a title and a chapter from this slide. Proceed to the next index and repeat the process.

To  sum  up…

Ensure the contrast between the background and font

Use a plain background

Keep an eye on the resolution and image size

Chose classic fonts

Highlight the title

Give titles automatically with OCR

Use the Multilanguage option