Reputation: 1966

Recognition of a font from an image using PHP

I'm curious - how to recognize font from an image supplied...

EDIT: ...with use of PHP? For example - user uploads photo of some text (let's say from a newspaper) and wants to know which font were used or which font is the most similar one.

Upvotes: 6

Answers (6)

ditoiuc

Reputation: 11

I was searching for the same thing and found this Whatfontis API. It works pretty good for me. You can use any language, input and output is done in json

Upvotes: 1

Fivos Vilanakis

Reputation: 1500

This is obviously an old question but I'm really proud of our font-matching engine, so please let me add some relative information.

This is not a publicly available library or SDK (at least not yet) but it's an engine embedded in a product:

http://www.findmyfont.com

It reads an image (or take a screen capture) and matches the characters you select against all fonts of your computer - either installed or not.

The matching speed is up to 5 millions fonts/min, that means it can match e.g. an image of 5-6 letters against 100.000 fonts in 1-2 secs.

The matching accuracy depends mostly on the image quality & resolution (a min of 20 pixels height is recommended) and it also depends on how unique is the shape of the selected letters. In general: If you really have the font in your computer and select 2-3 letters of any image, you will find the actual font on the top-5 matches - usually the top match - and this is true for as much as 600.000 font files.

We are now in beta testing of a new release, which allows the application to match also fonts you don't have on your computer by sending a match request to an online server.

I can't reveal much about our proprietary matching algorithm, but I can say this:

a. You don't need to mess-up with the actual outlines of a vector font: A well rendered bitmap of a letter is enough for a successful feature extraction.

b. If you want to achieve a high performance matching, you need to create and store an appropriate index by scanning once all letters of all fonts.

I hope it's clear that I haven't post all this info to advertise the product, but to say that I'm really proud as a developer for the design & implementation of this font-matching engine.

Cheers

Fivos

PS: Implementation environment/language: Qt/C++ on Windows/Mac OS/CentOS.

Upvotes: 0

Robin Orheden

Reputation: 2764

What I think he is asking for is a publicly available library for pattern recognition. Basically some sort of OCR, which can identify text, and match the text in an image against font family vectors. Am I correct?

Unfortunately I must say (with my knowledge) that there is no such library available. There is for plain OCR though.

http://www.aquaforest.com/en/ocrsdk.asp

One issue with identifying the font family of an image is that many font families have similar vectors. This means that a font like Georgia could easily be mistaken for Times New Roman, etc.

Upvotes: 2