Does anyone know of an OCR library that can handle colored photos (as opposed to scanned pages)?
It seems to me that most libraries out there work on B&W images and expect them to come from a scanner. I need something that can take a colored photo of, say, a billboard, and extract text from it.
I'm currently considering converting these images to B&W tiffs and feeding them to one of the libraries mentioned in this question, but I'm skeptical... These library are probably designed around the assumption that images are of scanned documents, or scanned book pages. I need something that would work on text in any orientation, varying sizes, weird alignments, etc. basically something that can extract the most text out of these images - it doesn't have to be 100% accurate.
Any ideas?