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This is a broader question that I am looking for some help on. I am trying to build an application that monitors the current display( the actual display that the user is seeing on his monitor). Very specifically i need to extract data from a specific portion of the desktop (an application is running there), monitor for changes in that part of the screen. I understand the changes would be visual and will need image processing. Tried google but it has been a nightmare. It picks up keywords like display , monitor, extract and i get unusable results. It would be really helpful if anyone who has done this before, or maybe if someone cant point me in the right direction. Thanks! hope i have explained my query well.

Akshay Kumar
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  • You're looking for a key-logger, I assume. (tut, tut...) – Richard Dunn Aug 01 '17 at 19:23
  • @RichardDunn If i am not wrong, a keylogger monitors keyboard strokes correct? I am looking to monitor a portion of the screen for changes eg. text changed from login to logout – Akshay Kumar Aug 01 '17 at 19:31
  • Yeah, I was only kidding with ya. I've never worked with display outputs, etc. soz... – Richard Dunn Aug 01 '17 at 19:33
  • why do you even include "display" into you google search? its an image. who cares where or if it is displayed. processing is the same... – Piglet Aug 01 '17 at 20:10
  • You could use `nircmd` http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html (see last few entries in table) or similar to grab the screen pretty simply without any code. You could process that with **ImageMagick** quite readily but you'd need to be more specific. – Mark Setchell Aug 01 '17 at 20:53

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If you are going to do that for windows, then it is better to look into WINAPI and start digging from here:

GetWindowRect on MSDN

FindWindow on MSDN

C++ example on Stack Overflow for getWindowRect

C++ example on Stack Overflow for FindWindow

You can enumerate windows, search for particular keywords in titles, update window coordinates by timer. After you will successfully do that, dig here:

'efficiently acquiring a screenshot of the windows desktop' on Stack Overflow

'How to compare byte to byte of two bitmap screenshots in c++' on Stack Overflow

Right after you will successfully acquire screenshot and learn how to detect changes (not to re-process whole image), dig here:

OCR engine - libtesseract on Github

C++ libtesseract API example on Github

Happy learning!

iXCray
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