Similar tool for mathematical symbols: <a href="http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html" rel="nofollow">http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html</a>
I could not get it to identify a British Pound symbol after several attempts. The top proposed glyph was much more obscure and the following ones were increasingly obscure from there.<p>I suspect that the training corpus may have been a table of Unicode glyphs rather than text from the wild.
This is kind of a missing piece, in a lot of ways. With such a large character set as Unicode's, discovery can be a real pain - when you see a novel character, how do you find out what it's called, so you can find out how to type it?<p>Unless you're using something like Emacs which lets you point at a character and ask the editor to tell you everything it knows about what's there, this kind of identification becomes a daunting task to contemplate. Shapecatcher does an excellent job of it; as long as you can draw something roughly approximating the glyph you have in mind, it'll very effectively winnow down the search space to a very manageable list of possible matches.
The search isn't really perfect. I tried drawing a (pretty good, IMO) Hiragana "no" and that result was in the third place (First was, a latin small m. の looks nothing like an m). Then tried Greek small sigma (σ) but not perfectly (I draw ny sigmas in a weird way, looks like this: <a href="http://imgur.com/a/XYVHO" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/XYVHO</a>), the top result I got (Malayalam fraction one quarter: ൳) kind of looks like the thing I drew, but the rest of the results are not really resembling it and there's no sigma there.
Interesting idea. It seems to struggle a bit with some types of characters. For example, drawing a lowercase pi would return many characters with more than two legs, which showed up ahead of pi itself and other characters that do have the two. Does clicking on the good/bad feedback links in cases like this help to train the algorithm in some way?
Really well done, and handled my crappy drawings just fine.<p>I did see the link to your thesis on captcha, but a specific higher level blog post on how this works would likely be popular.<p>Edit: One piece of feedback...it's hard to draw dots. You have to drag the cursor with the button down, or drag your finger in mobile to get a dot. So dots end up more like little lines. Also, an "Undo" to remove the last "cursor down / draw" event would be nice. Starting over for every line is the only current option.
This is cool, though I was a bit disappointed to notice the part about no support for CJK characters after trying to draw one and not having it recognized. It seems to me that looking up Unihan ideographs is an area where a tool like this could be particularly useful.
I use this occasionally when trying to find a new glyph. There are some drawbacks though:<p>• Last updated in 2012: <a href="http://shapecatcher.com/news.html" rel="nofollow">http://shapecatcher.com/news.html</a><p>• No way to draw straight lines except pixel-by-pixel (really tedious). This turned out to be a pain when trying to draw various arrow types (made of straight lines).<p>I'm hoping the author, Benjamin Milde, picks the project up again and keeps it updated, or makes it Open Source, then someone else does.
Pretty neat. Would be useful to be able to restrict the blocks that are searched. For example I might know that the character I'm looking for is Japanese, so if I could let it know that I was looking for is Japanese then it could restrict itself to Katakana, Katakana Phonetic Extensions and other blocks if any that apply to Japanese specifically.
Android Wear does something like this for emojis - I've gotten pretty good at drawing a "thumbs up" to respond to text messages and such.