Via TechCrunch. Google filed a patent application “Recognizing Text In Images”. It is supposed to improve indexing of internet images and also read text in images from street views, store shelves etc. Since it is related to computer vision, I decided to take a look.

First I looked at the list of claims of the patent. Those are legal statements (a few dozen in this case) that should clearly define what is new in this invention. That’s what would be protected by the patent. The claims seem a bit strange. For example it seems that the “independent” claims (ones that don’t refer to other claims) end with “and performing optical character recognition on the enhanced image”. So, there seems to be no new OCR algorithms here…

According to some comments, the idea is that there is no “OCR platform being able to do images on the level that is suggested here”. It may indeed be about a “platform” because the claims are filled with generalities. Can you patent a “platform”? Basically you put together some well known image processing-manipulation-indexing methods plus some unspecified OCR algorithms and it works! This sounds like a “business method” patent. In fact, in spite of its apparent complexity the patent reminds me of the one-click patent. And what is the point of this patent? Is it supposed to prevent Yahoo or MS from doing the same? Are we supposed to forget that it has been done before?