A developer has created a Chrome extension which allows selection, copying and translation of text in images and PDF files. The extension is called Naptha and according to the developer it applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms.
The extension is useful when you stumble upon a PDF document which doesn't allow copying of text, or text in an image. Without the extension you either had to upload the image to a web service or manually type in the text.
The software works pretty well, above we tested the Naptha extension on images from our latest Toshiba SSD review. The plugin recognized a lot of text, all blue areas mark where it recognized text. Of course the images above are far from ideal for optical character recognition (OCR) but the results are pretty good.
When we tested it on all text images the results were often flawless. Translation of the text is powered by Google Translate and the translated text is shown directly in the image, also impressive. The text erase feature blends the text with the background which works, but traces of the text still remain.
If you're interested to try it yourself, you can find a download of the Chrome Extension here.