6 ms·

Typefont – An algorithm to recognize the font of a text in a photo

109 points by rendernos 9y ago

Sujan 9y ago
Nice project, but: > An artificial intelligence [...] Really?
- chc 9y ago
  This certainly sounds like an AI application. Do you have some reason to think it isn't?
  - hk__2 9y ago
    It uses OCR then compares what it find with everything in the database. It doesn’t “learn” anything from what it finds; in fact you can’t even train it because it uses a static database.
  - nom 9y ago
    Yes, it is a necessary part of an AI, but I still wouldn't dare to call it an "AI Algorithm". Overuse of the term poisons the actual AI research field, it's only use is to aid click bait.
    - rsrsrs86 9y ago
      It is AI, it is just that not everything called AI is really interesting anymore. This should have attracted interest in the 80's.
- amelius 9y ago
  See also https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
  - tyingq 9y ago
    https://www.whatfontis.com/ https://www.whatfontis.com/ as well, though it presents an irritating survey you have to decline to see the results.
  - retox 9y ago
    What The Font has been good to me in this past.
- rendernos 9y ago
  The term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds. Understanding the shape in a image, reading the text from a photo can also be considered AI.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    But that doesn't make it 'an AI'. That's a subtle difference but it matters.
  - nom 9y ago
    Extracting characters from an image and comparing them to a database of known fonts using a naive distance metric can be called AI? Really?
  - surajx 9y ago
    The key term here is mimics - to be classified as intelligent, the an algorithm should be able to significantly mimic human level intelligence in your domain. For example if your algorithm could read human handwriting and predict what font it was written in, or maybe what font it's closely related to, is something that's closer to the AI bandwagon.
- catshirt 9y ago
  zzz
mrspeaker 9y ago
My Fonts had a tool for doing this back in (at least) 2009... I remember because I tried to run the burning "NERDS" sign from "Revenge of the nerds" through it. Didn't work very well though: I had to resort to human intervention. http://www.mrspeaker.net/2009/01/21/revenge-of-the-font-nerds/ http://www.mrspeaker.net/2009/01/21/revenge-of-the-font-nerd... Keen for an online version of this project so I can see if it fares any better!
stevehiehn 9y ago
This problem is nice because unlike other datasets i think you could automate the creation of the data. I'm thinking you could generate a couple million photos with text captions all with known fonts.
Bluestrike2 9y ago
It's a neat implementation for a very annoying (and common) scenario. I've used various font ID tools in the past and always found them rather limited. The vast majority are manual ones that ask you to identify particular characteristics of the font in question and then go from there. While that might be helpful, it's also pretty limited. Most of the time, I wound up posting an image to a typography forum to get an ID. A few sites like My Fonts have an API that lets you generate font samples.[0] You could probably use that to automate generating your font database. Throw in a few other APIs (Google Fonts[1], Typekit[2], etc.) and some other type stores--along with some of the foundry websites that don't sell their fonts on other sites (Hoefler & Co., cough)--and you could build up a very rigorous database/recognition tool in short order. 0. https://dev.myfonts.com/#font_sample https://dev.myfonts.com/#font_sample 1. https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/developer_api https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/developer_api 2. https://www.adobe.io/apis/creativecloud/typekit/docs/overview.html https://www.adobe.io/apis/creativecloud/typekit/docs/overvie...
aamederen 9y ago
Can this technique be used for recognizing handwriting of individuals?
- rsrsrs86 9y ago
  Yes. You wouldn't need to worry about breaking it down to individual letters, though. Not necessarily. You would need pages and pages of writing from the individuals.
nom 9y ago
Please stop using "AI" to describe simple algorithms like this. This has nothing to do with the field of artificial intelligence. The code just extracts individual characters from the image and compares them visually to a prepared database of known fonts, using the hamming distance. You wouldn't call OCR an "AI algorithm", would you? Edit: "nothing to do" is not accurate, but AI is definitely not an appropriate term to use here
- keppanaviimen 9y ago
  "The code just extracts" please. Do you think extracting letters from a image is a joke? There is a engine in development since 1985 for doing that. http://www.kloover.com/publications/Kluever_-_OCR_using_ANN.pdf http://www.kloover.com/publications/Kluever_-_OCR_using_ANN....
  - nom 9y ago
    Yes, I know it's a hard problem. Tesseract (the OCR library that is used in this project) is in development since 1985, but even google doesn't dare to call it an AI algorithm. OCR is of course a part that is required to build an artificial intelligence, but the term "AI" is just to overused nowadays and calling every single algorithm capable of recognizing something in some data is poison to the field itself. Solving AI is a huuge and daring problem and we should use the term appropriately.
  - hk__2 9y ago
    It’s not a joke, but it’s not AI either.
- GordonS 9y ago
  > You wouldn't call OCR an "AI algorithm", would you? It depends on how it was implemented; if it used a neural network for example, then yes, I would
- rsrsrs86 9y ago
  This is a canonical AI problem. This is a task usually performed by human beings that was found to be excellently performed by computers. It falls within the grand field of computer vision. It is a solved and trivial problem nowadays, but is sure is AI.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rendernos 9y ago
I changed the description of the repository and removed the AI tag, thank you and don't be evil!
mrcactu5 9y ago
this is amazing ... how is this even possible?

109 points by rendernos 9y ago

Sujan 9y ago

Nice project, but: > An artificial intelligence [...] Really?

chc 9y ago
This certainly sounds like an AI application. Do you have some reason to think it isn't?
- hk__2 9y ago
  It uses OCR then compares what it find with everything in the database. It doesn’t “learn” anything from what it finds; in fact you can’t even train it because it uses a static database.
- nom 9y ago
  Yes, it is a necessary part of an AI, but I still wouldn't dare to call it an "AI Algorithm". Overuse of the term poisons the actual AI research field, it's only use is to aid click bait.
  - rsrsrs86 9y ago
    It is AI, it is just that not everything called AI is really interesting anymore. This should have attracted interest in the 80's.
amelius 9y ago
See also https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
- tyingq 9y ago
  https://www.whatfontis.com/ https://www.whatfontis.com/ as well, though it presents an irritating survey you have to decline to see the results.
- retox 9y ago
  What The Font has been good to me in this past.
rendernos 9y ago
The term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds. Understanding the shape in a image, reading the text from a photo can also be considered AI.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  But that doesn't make it 'an AI'. That's a subtle difference but it matters.
- nom 9y ago
  Extracting characters from an image and comparing them to a database of known fonts using a naive distance metric can be called AI? Really?
- surajx 9y ago
  The key term here is mimics - to be classified as intelligent, the an algorithm should be able to significantly mimic human level intelligence in your domain. For example if your algorithm could read human handwriting and predict what font it was written in, or maybe what font it's closely related to, is something that's closer to the AI bandwagon.
catshirt 9y ago
zzz

mrspeaker 9y ago

My Fonts had a tool for doing this back in (at least) 2009... I remember because I tried to run the burning "NERDS" sign from "Revenge of the nerds" through it. Didn't work very well though: I had to resort to human intervention. http://www.mrspeaker.net/2009/01/21/revenge-of-the-font-nerds/ http://www.mrspeaker.net/2009/01/21/revenge-of-the-font-nerd... Keen for an online version of this project so I can see if it fares any better!

stevehiehn 9y ago

This problem is nice because unlike other datasets i think you could automate the creation of the data. I'm thinking you could generate a couple million photos with text captions all with known fonts.

Bluestrike2 9y ago

It's a neat implementation for a very annoying (and common) scenario. I've used various font ID tools in the past and always found them rather limited. The vast majority are manual ones that ask you to identify particular characteristics of the font in question and then go from there. While that might be helpful, it's also pretty limited. Most of the time, I wound up posting an image to a typography forum to get an ID. A few sites like My Fonts have an API that lets you generate font samples.[0] You could probably use that to automate generating your font database. Throw in a few other APIs (Google Fonts[1], Typekit[2], etc.) and some other type stores--along with some of the foundry websites that don't sell their fonts on other sites (Hoefler & Co., cough)--and you could build up a very rigorous database/recognition tool in short order. 0. https://dev.myfonts.com/#font_sample https://dev.myfonts.com/#font_sample 1. https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/developer_api https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/developer_api 2. https://www.adobe.io/apis/creativecloud/typekit/docs/overview.html https://www.adobe.io/apis/creativecloud/typekit/docs/overvie...

aamederen 9y ago

Can this technique be used for recognizing handwriting of individuals?

rsrsrs86 9y ago
Yes. You wouldn't need to worry about breaking it down to individual letters, though. Not necessarily. You would need pages and pages of writing from the individuals.

nom 9y ago

Please stop using "AI" to describe simple algorithms like this. This has nothing to do with the field of artificial intelligence. The code just extracts individual characters from the image and compares them visually to a prepared database of known fonts, using the hamming distance. You wouldn't call OCR an "AI algorithm", would you? Edit: "nothing to do" is not accurate, but AI is definitely not an appropriate term to use here

keppanaviimen 9y ago
"The code just extracts" please. Do you think extracting letters from a image is a joke? There is a engine in development since 1985 for doing that. http://www.kloover.com/publications/Kluever_-_OCR_using_ANN.pdf http://www.kloover.com/publications/Kluever_-_OCR_using_ANN....
- nom 9y ago
  Yes, I know it's a hard problem. Tesseract (the OCR library that is used in this project) is in development since 1985, but even google doesn't dare to call it an AI algorithm. OCR is of course a part that is required to build an artificial intelligence, but the term "AI" is just to overused nowadays and calling every single algorithm capable of recognizing something in some data is poison to the field itself. Solving AI is a huuge and daring problem and we should use the term appropriately.
- hk__2 9y ago
  It’s not a joke, but it’s not AI either.
GordonS 9y ago
> You wouldn't call OCR an "AI algorithm", would you? It depends on how it was implemented; if it used a neural network for example, then yes, I would
rsrsrs86 9y ago
This is a canonical AI problem. This is a task usually performed by human beings that was found to be excellently performed by computers. It falls within the grand field of computer vision. It is a solved and trivial problem nowadays, but is sure is AI.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rendernos 9y ago

I changed the description of the repository and removed the AI tag, thank you and don't be evil!

mrcactu5 9y ago

this is amazing ... how is this even possible?