Do you know that now it’s possible to copy, translate, edit and even erase the text inside any image you find on the internet? You may be thinking I am ‘mad’, but actually I am not. Google has made an amazing extension called Project Naptha for its web browser that lets users copy and erase text inside any image they find on the web!
The Project Naptha extension for Google Chrome is made by developer Kevin Kwok. It uses a number of optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms, including libraries developed by Microsoft and Google, which quickly build a model of text regions, words and letters from nearly any image. What you have to do is, simply install the extension and hover your cursor over available image text and select it.
Using the built-in tools, you can do many things. For example: you can easily copy your selection. This is great if you’ve been emailed a scanned document or a screenshot of an error message. Instead of manually typing it back into to Google, you can simply copy and paste the output directly into your search bar. If an image includes text and you don’t understand it, Naptha also supports numerous translation services, allowing you to decode the unintelligible language.
The most impressive feature of Project Napth is its ability to edit and remove text. Using a technique called ‘inpainting‘ (similar to Photoshop’s “Content-Aware Fill”), Naptha captures each of the independent colors from regions around the text and intelligently fills the space where it used to be.
Kwok has mentioned that he’s consistently working on expanding the project and he will try to bring this feature to other browsers like Mozilla Firefox. The developer also hopes to include support for vertical text in the future.
Project Naptha is available now for free via the official website or Google’s Chrome Web Store.
Sources: Project Naptha, Chrome Web Store
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