TEXT DETECTION ON MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS DEVICES

A mobile communications device with an integrated camera is directed towards text. A video stream is analyzed in real time to detect one or more words in a specified region of the video frames and to indicate the detected words on a display. Users can select a word in a video stream and subsequently move or extend the initial selection. It is thus possible to select multiple words. A subregion of the video frame comprising the detected word(s) is pre-processed and compressed before being sent to a remote optical character recognition (OCR) function which may be integrated in an online service such as an online search service.