Jim West On Chess: Optical Character Recognition for Chess

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Optical Character Recognition for Chess

Dr. Gerhard Roth has written an Android app, called ChessOcr, that does optical character recognition (OCR) on chess figures.

It uses the camera in an Android device to convert a picture of a chess figure in a book or magazine into a fen string, basically doing OCR on the figure, which can be transferred easily to a chess app.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov