On 10th March, Xerox announced a Latest Technology  (Translation Service) that can Scan a document, Translate it in any language and Print from the Scanner or from Xerox App.

For moment I was wondering how they will make it work, but then I got a feeling that it can be Automated with PowerShell and no need to buy a new Hardware for this feature.

BREAKING THE PROBLEM : 

So lets break this problem into steps.

  1. A Scanned document is an Image, Save it as a file.
  2. Extract the Text from the Image
  3. Translate the Text in desired Language.
  4. Print / Email / Save the Documents

Easy! right?  🙂 at least it looks like from the above points.

HOW TO ACHIEVE IT : 

compare

STEP 1 – Use any Tool (Like SnagIt) to capture an Image of the document, you can also use Print Screen and save  the capture as an Image. Lets take below screenshot as our sample Image.

Image
This is your Sample Image

STEP 2 – Use Microsoft’s Optical Character Recognition  (OCR)  API to extract Text from the Image, I’ve created a function for that and you can deep dive into it later.

code

STEP 3 –  We have the Text extracted from Image as set of sentences divided into Lines like in our Sample Image, now it’s time to Feed these sentences to Bing Translation API and get them translated to any desired language.

English to Hindi :

hindi

English to German :

German

You can choose from a Range of Languages in which you want to convert your Image extracted text.
a

STEP 4 – In previous step we’ve converted the Image text in desired language, now time to Print, Save or Email it.

You can pipe the output to Out-Printer cmdlet and it will get printed. Pipe the results to Set-Content to save it in File.

Or, Convert it to HTML and send as a body in an email. You can also send the File as an Attachment. Like in the below screenshot.

print

HOW TO RUN IT:

f

SCRIPT :

Function Get-ImageText()
{
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$True,Position=0,ValueFromPipeline=$True)]
[String] $Path
)
Process{
$SplatInput = @{
Uri= "https://api.projectoxford.ai/vision/v1/ocr"
Method = 'Post'
InFile = $Path
ContentType = 'application/octet-stream'
}
$Headers = @{
'Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key' = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
}
Try{
# Call OCR API and feed the parameters to it.
$Data = (Invoke-RestMethod @SplatInput -Headers $Headers -ErrorVariable +E)
$Language = $Data.Language # Detected language
$i=0; foreach($D in $Data.regions.lines){
$i=$i+1;$s='';
''|select @{n='LineNumber';e={$i}},@{n='LanguageCode';e={$Language}},@{n='Sentence';e={$D.words.text |%{$s=$s+"$_ "};$s}}}
}
Catch{
"Something went wrong While extracting Text from Image, please try running the script again`nError Message : "+$E.Message
}
}
}
Function Translate-text()
{
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$True,Position=0,ValueFromPipeline=$True)]
[String] $Text,
[String] [validateSet('Arabic','Hindi','Japanese','Russian','Spanish','French',`
'English','Korean','Urdu','Italian','Portuguese','German','Chinese Simplified')
]$From,
[String] [validateSet('Arabic','Hindi','Japanese','Russian','Spanish','French',`
'English','Korean','Urdu','Italian','Portuguese','German','Chinese Simplified')
]$To
)
Begin{
# Language codes hastable
$LangCodes = @{'Arabic'='ar'
'Chinese Simplified'='zh-CHS'
'English'='en'
'French'='fr'
'German'='de'
'Hindi'='hi'
'Italian'='it'
'Japanese'='ja'
'Korean'='ko'
'Portuguese'='pt'
'Russian'='ru'
'Spanish'='es'
'Urdu'='ur'
}
# Secret Client ID and Key you get after Subscription
$ClientID = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
$client_Secret = ‘XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
# If ClientId or Client_Secret has special characters, UrlEncode before sending request
$clientIDEncoded = [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($ClientID)
$client_SecretEncoded = [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($client_Secret)
}
Process{
ForEach($T in $Text)
{
Try{
# Azure Data Market URL which provide access tokens
$URI = "https://datamarket.accesscontrol.windows.net/v2/OAuth2-13"
# Body and Content Type of the request
$Body = "grant_type=client_credentials&client_id=$clientIDEncoded&client_secret=$client_SecretEncoded&scope=http://api.microsofttranslator.com"
$ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
# Invoke REST method to Azure URI
$Access_Token=Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $Uri -Body $Body -ContentType $ContentType -Method Post
# Header value with the access_token just recieved
$Header = "Bearer " + $Access_Token.access_token
# Invoke REST request to Microsoft Translator Service
[string] $EncodedText = [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($T)
[string] $uri = "http://api.microsofttranslator.com/v2/Http.svc/Translate?text=" + $EncodedText + "&from=" + $LangCodes.Item($From) + "&to=" + $LangCodes.Item($To);
$Result = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $URI -Headers @{Authorization = $Header} -ErrorVariable Error
Return $Result.string.'#text'
}
catch
{
"Something went wrong While Translating Text, please try running the script again`nError Message : "+$Error.Message
}
}
}
}
view raw ExtractTranslateText-FromImage.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

PLEASE NOTE : 

You would need Subscription key for Microsoft optical Recognition API and ClientID and Client_secret for Microsoft Bing Translation API, please follow below links to get an idea how to obtain these keys.

Microsoft OCR API
Microsoft Translator Services

 

Thank you for stopping by, have a nice weekend.