image recogniton?

[J Kenneth King]

Li Han <lihang9999 at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi! I know little about the computer image processing, and now I have
> a fancy problem which is how to read the time from the picture of a
> clock by programming ?  Is there anyone who can give me some
> suggestions?
> Thank!
>      Li Han

I do work in object recognition, and I would classify this as a rather
difficult problem. Not impossible of course, but you'll need some OCR to
read the clock face and some sort of magnitude vector feature to tell
which hand is which and the "general direction" is is pointing in.

Also, depends if we're talking digital clocks or analog. :)

The other problem is one of accuracy: depending on your input image,
even slight variances can change your results.

I'm curious as to what application the solution to this problem is
practical for all of its difficulty?