New Vision Concepts
EZReader - EZCamera Help

    

Table of Contents

Return to the Application List.

 OverView

The Camera viewer displays any camera attached to the computer. Its primary function is to allow users to magnify printed materials placed under the camera. The user simply clicks on the image to zoom in and right-clicks to zoom out. The escape button exits from EZCamera. Books, newspapers, mail and product labels are common items that low vision users might want to magnify.

EZCamera can magnify above 12X but typically low vision users use magnification levels of 4X-8X.

 EZCamera Main Screen

In this image, the EZCamera application is displaying the video from the webcam at the top of the PC monitor.

The three rows of icons in the EZCamera main screen perform the following functions:

Row 1 Icons

Row 2 Icons

Row 3 Icons

EZCamera zoom can be increased by clicking on the video image. Zoom can be decreased by right-clicking on the video image.

 OCR Text Extraction

EZCamera can extract the text from a video image and display the text in the font and colors selected by the user. Not only is the result easier to see, but it can be read out loud to the user as well.

OCR is started by pressing the Capture+ icon on the toolbar. That displays the video image full screen. The user then selects an area of text to capture by clicking to the upper left of the text and then to the lower right of the text.

EZReader will draw an outline around the text to indicate the selected area, then extract the text found within the outline.

The capture text is placed on the clipboard and then displayed in the EZReader Text Viewer, as seen in the image above.

The extracted text can be formatted as can any text in other EZReader application, such as changing the font size and colors.

The extracted text can also be read out loud.

 Freeze Screen

When the Freeze command is issues, EZCamera locks the video and present the following command options:

Freeze Row 1 Icons

The freeze option is useful for locking the video into a document that might otherwise require the user's hands to keep the document in place.

Exit from this screen to restore the video to live operation.

 Snapshot History Screen

When a snapshot is taken, its name is set to the date and time. Users can change the name to something more memorable.

Snapshot History Row 1 Icons

Snapshot History Row 2 Icons

 Binary Screen

The live video can be converted to any of the 4 binary color pairs. This can make it much easier to see and read text when the text and its background do not have a high contrast.

Binary Row 1 Icons

Binary Row 2 Icons

 Information Display

EZCamera can display various camera settings - current camera name, current image resolution, a list of all attached cameras and various Zoom settings. Just press "I" to display the information.

To close the Window, press ESC, right-click the window or press the "X" in the upper right corner of the window.

 Zoom Algorithm

By default, EZCamera zooms in and out of an image by using a digital algorithm. As with all digital zoom algorithms, each successive zoom level introduces distortion into the image, to the point where zooms greater than 8X introduce enough distortion to make the image generally unusable. EZCamera supports a digital zoom up to 8X.

The camera that comes with EZReader has an additional, built-in zoom which is manually controlled using buttons on the camera base. The EZCamera digital zoom is applied in addition to the built-in camera zoom, resulting in a much larger zoom range.

 Keyboard Shortcuts

Each of the 4 windows in EZCamera offer their own set of keyboard shortcuts.

Main Screen Keyboard Shortcuts