Recognising the text in an image through the camera

Posted by meyrick on 30-May-2014 02:09

Hi there,

Does anyone have an idea of how you could recognise the text in an image through the camera on the device and send back the return value as string?

Thanks.

Mobile - Forum

Posted by egarcia on 30-May-2014 05:38

Hello,

In general, you would need an OCR engine.

The OCR engine could be built into the mobile app or be cloud based. You could also have your own OCR engine and running it on your own servers (to meet security/privacy requirements).

For OpenEdge Mobile, you could add a PhoneGap plugin or add JavaScript code to call a REST/web service to extract the text from the image file. You would use the camera service to take the picture first.

Making it to work real time is not as easy.

For example, Google recently bought Word Lens that does real time OCR and translation.

www.techrepublic.com/.../google-picks-up-incredible-visual-translation-app-word-lens-and-makes-it-free

I did some internet searches (OCR image, OCR iOS/Android, OCR PhoneGap plugin, OCR REST API).

I found some references to the Tesseract OCR engine.

Here are some links that might be useful:

github.com/.../PhonegapOCRPlugin

stackoverflow.com/.../free-phonegap-ocr-plugins-for-android

stackoverflow.com/.../android-phonegap-plugin-for-ocr

stackoverflow.com/.../ocr-web-service

www.aspose.com/.../ocr-api.aspx

www.aspose.com/.../Extract%20OCR%20or%20HOCR%20Text%20from%20Images

http://ocrapiservice.com

stamplin.com/.../extracttextpdf

http://www.onlineocr.net

www.onlineocr.net/.../ocrwebservice

www.smartocr.com/sdk.htm

http://www.newocr.com

I have not tried any of these plugins/web services myself.

I hope this helps.

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