Optical character recognition on the iPhone

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+2 Q:

Optical character recognition on the iPhone

Is it possible on an iPhone app to take a picture and extract an string from the picture? We'd like to make our app to look for a serial number on a database (very long number) without the user having to type it.

Is there any Cocoa/Objective-C API for this or any C/C++ library that can be used in an iPhone app?

Thanks in advance!

+1 A:

You can have a look at the tesseract-ocr project. It's not actually made to use on an iPhone but I believe others have made great use of it on the iPhone.

Here is a demo that makes use of the tesseract ocr engine.

epatel 2010-10-15 18:26:10

Thank you for this. The demo is crashing on my test phone but definitively this points in the right track.

Enmanuel G 2010-10-15 20:59:13

+1 A:

I was looking for something similar and came across ABBYY's mobileOCR solution I've not used it yet and have no idea how much it is but you should be able to integrate it into your app by all accounts.

earnshavian 2010-10-15 18:31:04

Thanks! I'll try the tesseract-ocr first but this one looks like a good candidate if we decide to go with a commercial solution.

Enmanuel G 2010-10-15 21:01:50

+1 A:

I have this in my bookmarks: http://code.google.com/p/zxing/ It has iPhone, Android and Java code to deal with image capture and bar codes. I haven't test it yet.

madmw 2010-10-15 18:50:13

ansaurus

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