recognize

Edit scanned documents with FreeOCR

No matter how big of a scanned or PDF file you have, this program can handle it. Free OCR will read an otherwise uneditable document and churn out copyable text you can manipulate however you like.

With support for more than 10 different languages, this software impresses with both its accuracy and speed. It churns out an editable version of a small section of text in seconds, but only takes a minute or two to read documents with tiny text or bizarre formatting. You can even crop out sections of the document you don't need to shave seconds off … Read more

A Kwik way to manage media

Nero Kwik Media is a light and free media manager with which you can organize, edit, and share your music, photos, videos, and data. Imagine iTunes and iPhoto rolled into one, then trimmed in half. While this download is technically "free," there is one caveat: you'll have to purchase some of its functionality in the form of "apps" listed in Nero's built-in store. Sure, most of these add-ons aren't too expensive, but it's a shame that a few of them (like Nero Kwik Play, a video decoder) don't come with the … Read more

Will a facial expression recognizer help autistic kids?

Computer scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore are developing a system that could help autistic children identify the emotions of those around them by first locating the edges of faces, then finding crucial fiducial points to extract and process features, and finally classifying those features into corresponding emotions.

Their paper, "Towards a Portable Intelligent Facial Expression Recognizer," is available online through the journal Intelligent Decision Technologies (Volume 3:3).

"Emotion is a state of feeling involving thoughts, physiological changes, and an outward expression," write the paper's authors, Teik-Toe Teoh, Yok-Yen Nguwi and Siu-Yeung Cho … Read more