So I saw this funny word search on the internet that was composed only of letters K, A and Y. The point of the word search was to find the word KAYAK. Seemingly impossible and the author disclosed that the word KAYAK appears in the glyphs matrix only once.
After I spent a couple of minutes solving the puzzle I figured it would be interesting to write a program to solve the puzzle for me, since I've never done any OCR before, and wanted to try it.
The very first step was to remove the title and help text from the word search so it could be processed by the program without distractions. I've done this using Mac OS X's Preview.app. Here's the image after cropping:
Then, using OpenCV I separated individual glyphs into a matrix, storing each glyph on index according to its position in the glyphs matrix on the image.
After that, I initialized Artificial Neural Network with following topology: 9 inputs, 5 neurons in one hidden layer and one output. I resized each glyph into 3x3 pixel matrix, each pixel corresponding to one input and selected 3 glyphs for training the ANN.
After the ANN was trained I could predict each individual glyph and get ASCII code instead. Once predicted, it was relatively straightforward to search for the string. Here's an image of the output image after search has been done:
The implementation can be seen in the main.cpp file. The code is messy and not very clear but hopefully you'll find it useful.