Project Naptha

Live Demo: 

Project Naptha automatically applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. The result is a seamless and intuitive experience, where you can highlight as well as copy and paste and even edit and translate the text formerly trapped within an image.

Words on the web exist in two forms: there’s the text of articles, emails, tweets, chats and blogs— which can be copied, searched, translated, edited and selected— and then there’s the text which is shackled to images, found in comics, document scans, photographs, posters, charts, diagrams, screenshots and memes. Interaction with this second type of text has always been a second class experience, the only way to search or copy a sentence from an image would be to do as the ancient monks did, manually transcribing regions of interest.

You can watch as moving your cursor over a block of words changes it into the little I-beam. You can drag over a few lines and watch as a semitransparent blue box highlights the text, helping you keep track of where you are and what you’re reading. Hit Ctrl+C to copy the text, where you can paste it into a search bar, a Word document, an email or a chat window. Right-click and you can erase the words from an image, edit the words, or even translate it into a different language.

Security & Privacy: Project Naptha handles OCR and text detection locally on your computer. When highlighting text, the extension checks a remote server to determine whether a public high quality transcription exists using a cryptographic hash of the URL (this includes no cookies, user tokens, or any identifying information, and the server is incapable of storing access logs). For more information, read the section on security and privacy on