Need C# OCR Library to Convert Image to Text

Question

Hi,

I would like a library (preferably free) that is capable to read characters from an image and convert them to text. The input I will have is not a document, but a set of bitmaps that contain only one character each, and return a character in ASCII format for each bitmap.

The format of the input bitmap will be binarized and the size can be changed from 10*10 pixels to about 100*100 pixels.

Thanks for any help provided.

Update

I noted the program is being built successfully, but when running the code, it is exiting the program on

tessnet2.Tesseract tessocr = new tessnet2.Tesseract();

Answer 1

google's tesseract-ocr library has a .NET wrapper you can use (http://www.pixel-technology.com/freeware/tessnet2/)

Answer 2

My company, Atalasoft, has a couple of .NET OCR engines that you can work with, including a .NET wrapper for tesseract.

Be aware that most good OCR engines try to use greater context for matching (words with dictionary lookup). Without that surrounding context, you're likely to get very low-confidence results.

Answer 3

If you're ok with calling a web API to do the OCR, take a look at http://www.webservius.com/corp/docs/wisetrend.pdf - it uses a really advanced OCR engine on the back-end, you can test recognition quality by emailing test images to [email protected] (you will get OCR results back by email).