ImageTrans

ImageTrans is a computer-aided image and comic translation tool. It can automatically locate text areas and perform OCR operations using state-of-art OCR technology and a homebrew text areas merging and detecting algorithm, which is specially designed for comics (also webtoon, manga, manhwa and manhua). The original text can be automatically erased and the translation be reinjected.

ImageTrans can be used not only as an image translator, but also an image reader, an image transcriber and a deep learning annotator.

ImageTrans is the result of the thesis for my master’s degree: Design and Implementation of a Computer-Aided Comics Translation Tool.

Features Accurate text area detection, it can use natural scene text detection, object detection and a heuristic method to detect text.

Accurate text recognition Support multiple OCRs

It supports online OCR services such as Google, Baidu, Sogou and Youdao, and offline OCR engines such as Tesseract, PaddleOCR and Windows 10’s built-in OCR engine. See FAQ for the usage and the list of supported OCRs.

In addition, you can also call other OCR services by writing plug-ins.

Translation assist It can call a variety of machine translation engines. It also supports translation memory, corpus concordance, term management and other common functions of computer-aided translation software. It has a sound effects words search engine designed for translating comics.

Precise text removal and reinjection The software can use tools and algorithms like Sickzil-Machine, binarization, PatchMatch to generate text mask and remove text. It can refill the translation and automatically adjust the font size according to the position and area of text regions. All the above operations support manual adjustment.

Interoperability It can use scripts to save the results as Photoshop’s PSD files. It can export the data to Excel, Word, XLIFF files, or import data from these files.