1. Name of Your Project

Detect and Translate Chinese text in images

• What research topic/question your project is going to address?

Lately many translator applications have introduced the new feature that can scan a document or take an image with texts to detect and translate the texts into another language.

Many of these applications perform well with very neat and clear handwriting or high quality images but not quite well with cursive handwriting or low quality images. My research goal is to improve the detection performance in these cases.

• What technology will be used in your project?

Chinese – English Dictionary API

• What software and hardware will be needed for your project?

Python, PyTorch, matlab

• How are you planning to implement?

Build a pipeline that first enhance the quality of the image data using image processing techniques, then feeds data to a deep neural network model (maybe CNN) to detect the Chinese characters and connect to a dictionary API to translate the text into English.

• How is your project different from others? What’s new in your project?

The current applications do not perform very well on low quality images, so my goal is to find solutions to this limit of the translation apps.

• What’s the difficulties of your project? What problems you might encounter during your project?

I did some experiments and found that big apps like Google Translate still had trouble detecting the not-very-neat handwriting. Therefore it could be very challenging to achieve my research goal.