Read data from a Gif

Question

hi, i have a requirement to read data from a gif. The gif is exported from a Bloomberg terminal and contains Stock Prices. Is there anyway of reading the Stock Prices off this gif?

I'd prefer to do it in C#, but if there is any other programming language that is recommended, i would be grateful if you can share that with me.

regards

Answer 1

This sounds very dodgy to me. You would have to:

1. Have a high enough resolution such that optimization of the gif doesn't cause you to loose accuracy
2. You would have to use edge and corner detection to re-plot the time series / line from the gif. This is inherently inaccurate
3. You would have to now relative price/time for the gif dimensions. If this changes between gifs then forget it. Reading the values on the side/bottom would be a nightmare.

In short, find another source of data would be my recommendation. Image analysis on a gif to produce financial information isn't exactly a FIX update

Answer 2

A GIF is a graphic file. The only way to read data from it would be to use some form of OCR.

These software packages/libraries usually aren't free, but you could look at FreeOCR and try out what's there. Or look at the Tessnet2 Tesseract .NET library (most of the free/open source OCRs use the Tesseract engine).

I also feel compelled to point out that this is probably violating some sort of license agreement or TOC. Even if it isn't, you'd have a hard time guaranteeing any sort of accuracy for the information, and inaccuracy is an extremely bad thing when you're talking about stock prices. Be careful.