Is there any open source OCR project for the iPhone out there?

Question

I'm looking for an open source or free OCR project for the iPhone. Maybe there is some port of tesseract-ocr for the iPhone?

What I've found so far:

• How to compile Unix Apps for iPhone

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I think you're on the right track with that link.

One recommendation though, I'd recommend talking to an OCR expert. My use of Tesseract for document-scanning has been spotty, and you'll want to choose the right engine for your application and have experts available to optimize it.

Answer 2

Tesseract is being ported to the iPhone by a few different people, but they've run into a few issues so far. See this post with mention of camera issues as well as this one with library details. So far it does not work, but these guys seem to be making progress. You'll have to contact them, since they don't seem to be starting a project but just working on private, perhaps proprietary code (Tesseract OCR is Apache licensed, so that's legal).

Answer 3

I've recently been able to compile and use Tesseract on the iPhone, following this instructions: http://sites.google.com/site/olipion/cross-compilation/tesseract-ocr

There is also a demo project in GitHub: http://github.com/MarceloEmmerich/Tesseract-iPhone-Demo