Developer builds C++ tool to extract text from scrolling screen recordings at 94% accuracy
A developer built Palimpsest, a free open-source CLI tool written in C++ that extracts and reconstructs text from screen recordings of scrolling documents. The project was prompted by a personal need to digitize 1.5-hour banking regulation video lectures his father was watching, which had no downloadable PDF equivalent. Rather than transcribing manually, the developer designed a multi-stage processing pipeline and used AI to generate most of the C++ code. The tool uses lock-free producer-consumer buffers and a technique called dwell gating to avoid OCR on motion-blurred frames, instead capturing stable ones. It runs at 323 FPS on a laptop integrated GPU, achieves 94.56% accuracy on dense regulatory text, and outputs clean TXT or DOCX files entirely offline.
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