GT-Layout, developed by Fujifilm, rearranges the layout of text in photos making it easier to read on mobile devices.

Usually, if you are trying to read from a photo of a page of a book or a flyer, you need to zoom in and scroll back and forth across the page. With this new technology, the line break is automatically inserted and the words flow to match the available screen space, so the text can be read just by scrolling up and down.

“Each character is recognized as a picture, individually, without recognizing it as text. After cutting out each character as a picture, the spaces between pictures are recognized. When the user enlarges the image on the screen, the cuts are recognized, and the text is reflowed effectively. Also, if the layout contains both pictures and text, only the text is extracted, while avoiding the pictures, so only the text reflows.”

This technology is available to try as a feature in the Android app, GT-Document Lite for Dropbox. Currently, it only handles horizontally written text, but in the future, it will handle vertically written text as well.

“In Japan, many e-books have vertical text. For some old books, digital data isn’t available. When old books get scanned, and read on mobile devices, they’re hard to read if the characters are small. So, though this is just a sample, we are implementing this.”

From now on, Fujifilm plans to support English and other languages as well as Japanese.

“For example, people often write a lot of text on a whiteboard, and photograph it with a smartphone. But hand-written text can also be recognized as pictures instead of text. So, it can be reflowed by detecting gaps between characters.”

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