/peanuts-text-detection

Automated content transcription for Peanuts comic strips

Primary LanguagePython

Peanuts Text Detection

Peanuts Text Detection (PTD) contains scripts for downloading and transcribing Peanuts comics. Made for the folks over at /r/peanuts and peanuts-search, who are building a searchable Peanuts archive and who (as of May 31, 2016) seem to be transcribing all of the strips by hand. Just thought that this would speed up the workflow! :)

Uses Google's Cloud Vision API to obtain text from comic strips, nltk for tokenization and truecasing, and Redis as local storage for document content.

Quickstart

Clone this repository to your computer and change into the directory it creates:

$ git clone https://github.com/ohjay/peanuts-text-detection.git
$ cd peanuts-text-detection

Install the necessary Python libraries:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Log in to your Google Cloud Platform console. From there, create a project, enable the Vision API, and download credentials for a service account key. (More details can be found on the Cloud Platform Auth Guide.) Then set the following environment variable to point to said credentials:

$ export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/path/to/your/credentials-key.json

Download Redis here and start the server locally (make sure you're in the redis folder when you run this command):

$ src/redis-server

Congratulations! That's it for setup. At this point, you can transcribe strips by running any of the commands below. Output will be saved to transcribed/, which will be created in the working directory if it doesn't already exist.

$ ./transcribe.py <year> # transcribes all strips from a single year
$ ./transcribe.py <start_year> <end_year> # transcribes strips from a range of years
$ ./transcribe.py all # transcribes all strips
$ ./transcribe.py dir <input_dir> # transcribes images from the given directory

(You only need to execute one of the above commands.)

Note: If running the code throws the error oauth2client.client.HttpAccessTokenRefreshError: invalid_grant: Bad Request, try re-downloading the credentials at https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials?project=[YOUR-PROJECT-HERE].