Simple OCR of Analog Video (VGA) Signal

Question

Does anybody know about a product or an open source project that would do OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of a VGA stream? The VGA screens are very simple, numbers and strings in fixed locations. The screens do not change too often, or when they do, a readout every few seconds is ok.

Why bother? I would like to connect to the network some older medical devices that do not have any digital interfaces. I would use a VGA splitter to split the VGA signal, run OCR on it, then feed the recognized numbers/strings to various programs. I am talking about very simple OCR here, like numbers from 000.0 to 359.9.

Has anybody seen anything like this?

Answer 1

If the resolution isn't too high (640x480 rather than 2400x1600!) you should be able to frame grab it fairly easily. Just connect the green signal, it should have suitable sync.

There are specific VGA frame grabbers

The best open source OCR packages is Google's tesseract