Morse code image translator

1. 1

   Choose a picture, drop it on the box, paste it, or take a photo on your phone: a photo, screenshot or drawing of dots and dashes. Or try a sample.

2. 2

   Check the outlines on the picture: dots green, dashes yellow, word breaks black.

3. 3

   Read the text and the Morse below it. If a mark was misread, edit the Morse and the text follows.

4. 4

   Nothing found? Set Read as to Dots and dashes, or open Ink and threshold. Letters run together? Add the missing space in the Morse box.

5. 5

   Copy the text or the Morse, download a text file, or press Open in translator to hear it at your own speed and save it as MP3 or WAV.

• Photos, screenshots and drawings. PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF and any other picture your browser opens. On a phone, take a photo to scan a page.

• Shows its work. Each dot, dash and word break it found is outlined on the picture, so a wrong letter can be traced to its mark.

• Ink or chalk, one row or several. It finds which side is ink by itself, so chalk on a board reads like pen on paper, and rows are read top to bottom.

• Pictures of words too. Text recognition reads printed words and writes them in Morse, or decodes dots and dashes typed as text.

• Settings when you need them. Read as Auto, Dots and dashes or Text; set the ink and the threshold by hand.

• Eight code tables. International, American, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese and Korean.

• Keeps the result. Copy the text or the Morse, save a .txt file, play it, or open it in the translator.

1. to

   1Separates ink and paper

   Otsu’s method picks the brightness that best splits the picture into two sides, whatever the lighting. The rarer side is the ink, so light marks on a dark board work too.

2. dotdashword

   2Reads each shape

   The ink is cut into shapes. A solid shape about as wide as tall is a dot; one at least 1.8 times wider than tall is a dash; a thin slash or upright bar ends a word.

   Specks and shapes far taller or shorter than the rest are left out.

3. A, then B

   3Groups the gaps

   Marks are sorted into rows.

   Along each row the spaces are split into gaps inside a letter, between letters and between words, measured from the spaces themselves, so no ruler is needed.

Written Morse keeps the spacing of sent Morse in ITU-R M.1677-1: a dash is three dots long, and the gap inside a letter is one unit, between letters three and between words seven. If the picture holds letters instead, Tesseract, an open-source text recognition engine, reads them.