title: OCR an RSA key fob (security token)
body: <p>I put together a quick WinForm/embedded IE browser control which logs into our company's bank website each morning and scrapes/exports the desired deposit information (the bank is a smallish regional bank).  Since we have a few dozen "pseudoaccounts" that draw from the same master account, this actually takes 10-15 minutes to retrieve.  </p>
  
  <p>Anyway, the only problem is that our business bank account reuires an RSA security token (<a href="http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=1156)--if" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=1156)--if</a> you are not familiar, it is a small device which shows a random 6 digit number every 15(?) seconds, so I have to prompt for this value before starting.  This is on top of the website's login based security model, so even if you create a read-only account that can't do anything, you still have to put the RSA number in.  We have 5 of these tokens for different people in the company.  </p>
  
  <p>From our perspective this is nusiance security.  I was joking about using a web camera to OCR the digits from the key fob so they didn't have to type it in -- mainly so that the scraping/export would be done before anyone arrives in the morning.  Well, they asked if I could really do it.</p>
  
  <p>So now I ask you, how hard (how many hours) do you think it would take to OCR these digits reliably from a JPEG image produced by the camera?  I already know I can get the JPEG easily.  I think you get 3 tries to log in, so it really needs to hit a 99% accuracy rate.  I could work on this on my off time, but they don't want me to put more than a few hours into it, so I want to leverage as much existing code as possible.  This is a 7-segment display (like an alarm clock) so it's not exactly text that an OCR package would be used to seeing.  </p>
  
  <p>Also--there is a countdown timer on the side of the display; typically when it is down to 1 bar, you wait until the next number appears and it starts over at 5 bars (like signal strength on your cell phone).  So this would need to be OCRd as well but it is not text.</p>
  
  <p>Anyway the more I think about it as I type this, the less convinced I am that I can truly get this right, so maybe I should just work on it in my spare time?</p>