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573

answers:

2

Does anyone know of any free/open-source text recognition libraries in C/C++/Objective-C? Basically something that can scan an image, and read out all of the plain text.

+4  A: 

The most famous one is Tesseract OCR (sourceforge or Google Code) developed initially by Motorola and later become open source. It is also promoted by Google.

There are a few more, perhaps not as famous as Tesseract: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCRopus http://jocr.sourceforge.net/

rxin
After the jump it mentions HP as a source ...
stefanB
Tesseract is very good, however beware of it's limitations when it comes to dealing with non-latin character scripts (ie chinese).
Jonathan
+1  A: 

Here is an interesting article on how to extract numbers from picture.

The author collects large number of samples to train his neural networks algorithm and I believe doing the image processing with OpenCV.

stefanB