OCR On Your Smart Phone

Did you know that your phone can possibly do Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?

Mine, a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, can.

• I took a picture of an informative display hanging on the wall, that had two columns of side-by-side text.

The image hanging on the wall.

• I then used the camera's photo editing software (the pen icon at the bottom of the image below) to crop the image to just one of the text columns, and saved (upper-right corner of the cropped image below) that image.

The image in my phone's Gallery.

Cropping the image to just one of the columns.

• Then at the bottom right corner of that same editing window is a little yellow "T" in a broken-outline box (see the Gallery image above). When I clicked on that "T", it OCR'd the text and highlighted it.
• I was then able to single-press on the text, which popped up a menu allowing me to "Select All", which popped up another menu allowing me to "Copy".
• I could then go to an editor of some sort, and "Paste" the text into the editor.
• I then went back to my image, and edited it again, and "Revert"ed it back to the original.
• I then repeated the process for the second column.

In just a minute or two, I had the full text of the two columns of the informative display in an editor. With a clean original image with clean-looking text, the accuracy is very high.

Finished text.

The first unit of the hospital was erected in September 1924, at a cost of $150,000. West Texas Baptist Sanitarium had five stories, 72 rooms and admitted more than 800 patients during the first year.

When it opened, West Texas Baptist Sanitarium touted: hot and cold running water in each room; excellent nursing services; three modern elevators; three well-equipped operating rooms; capable physicians and surgeons; and an obstetrical department.

Labor and delivery services were quickly utilized. The first baby was born at Hendrick less than one month after the doors opened. Pauline Marie Turnidge, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W.A. Turnidge, was born on October 17, 1924.

The vision of a hospital for the Texas Midwest was well under way as the vision of Reverend Millard Jenkins became a reality. The motto for West Texas Baptist Sanitarium was that it opened its doors to everyone, "no matter what your belief or creed."