title: How to read time from recorded surveillance camera video?
body: <p>I have a problem where I have to read the time of recording from the video recorded by a surveillance camera.</p>
  
  <p>The time shows up on the top-left area of the video. Below is a link to screen grab of the area which shows the time. Also, the digit color(white/black) keeps changing during the duration of the video.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/rOQhO.png" alt="alt text">
  <a href="http://i55.tinypic.com/2j5gca8.png" rel="noreferrer">http://i55.tinypic.com/2j5gca8.png</a></p>
  
  <p>Please guide me in the direction to approach this problem. I am a Java programmer so would prefer an approach through Java. </p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong>
  Thanks unhillbilly for the comment. I had looked at the Ron Cemer OCR library and its performance is much below our requirement. </p>
  
  <p>Since the ocr performance is less than desired, I was planning to build a character set using the screen grabs for all the digits, and using some image/pixel comparison library to compare the frame time with the character-set which will show a probabilistic result after comparison.</p>
  
  <p>So I was looking for a good image comparison library(I would be OK with a non-java library which I can run using the command-line). Also any advice on the above approach would be really helpful.</p>