Some time back, I’d found a utility to do OCR for Kanji characters. But it has to be very clear, the symbols on a white background for high contrast. Trying to do this from a metal surface with reflections? Almost impossible.
So I’m trying to figure out what is written on this Platinum multi-pen. It’s enameled onto the surface, so it could easily be stripped off. But, I figured if I could know what it meant, maybe it might be worth leaving it intact. Any ideas?
LOL… well, I gave it a shot after cleaning up the characters a bit (inset).
I used i2OCR - Free Online Japanese OCR.
筆昌アカテデミー闇山 創設十周年記念
Translation? Pretty close. Just the 2nd character appears to be misinterpreted.
Fudechang Academy Kamiyama 10th Anniversary
Not bad!
To anyone who didn’t go to the academy, pretty much meaningless. Scrubbing to be done.
EDIT:
The OCD side of me couldn’t let this go. I cleaned up the image a bit. NOW I seem to have gotten the full representation.
筆曲アカデミー闇山 創設十周年記念
Writing Academy Kamiyama 10th Anniversary
If you have an iPhone, you can select the text on this image and then from the context menu select translate. But it detected it as mandarin 
Interesting. In Google translate, if I force it to see it as traditional Chinese (Mandarin?), it reads:
“10th anniversary commemoration of the founding of Biqu Akademi”
At least the 10th anniversary characters seem to be closely related between Chinese and Japanese.
Just use Google Lens. It can handle these situations really well.
Here’s your text: 箏曲アカデミー岡山 創設十周年記念
Which translates to: Sokyoku Academy Okayama 10th Anniversary
It seems to be a music academy specializing in Koto music.
That’s impressive. Incredibly accurate extraction in a variety of resolutions and background variations. Now I know – use Google for image text translation!
