Hi,
I couldn't get anything out of google, so I ask: Do you know some free open source C# OCR library?
edit I need C# option, no coding of wrappers from C++ or similar stuff. the google library's website doesn't work - not sure if it ceased to exist or it's just unavailable which is very uncommon for Google websites.
You can work with office 2007 OCR Engine. Look at this msdn reference for more information and sampe code.
You can use Tesseract OCR in C# by following the instructions given in this question.
This blog post might also be of interest. Seems they got the source to compile on Windows.
Have a look at OCRopus:
OCRopus is a [...] document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities.
The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90's and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods.
OCRopus is development is sponsored by Google and is initially intended for high-throughput, high-volume document conversion efforts. We expect that it will also be an excellent OCR system for many other applications.
(Quote from http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/)
OCRopus comes with C++ interfaces, so you would have to provide your own wrapper classes to C# though.
Try Asprise OCR v4.0 for C# [C Sharp] .NET
Asprise OCR SDK library for C# [C Sharp] .NET enables you to equip your C# [C Sharp] .NET applications with optical character recognition (OCR) ability.
Features of Asprise OCR include:
Highest Level of Accuracy - Asprise OCR can easily recognize difficult documents of poor image quality;
Excellent Format Retention - Text layouts on the input documents are preserved;
High Speed - Asprise OCR uses optimized OCR engine to perform excellent recognition in very short time;
Ease of Use - We strive to make the developer's life easier. Complex parameter configurations are removed from Asprise OCR SDK. You only have to supply the image document. Asprise OCR can intelligently determine the best setting internally.
Barcode Recognition - Beside characters (letters and numbers), Asprise OCR can recognize almost every kind of bar code. You can choose to recognize barcode or characters or both.
Flexible Licensing Scheme - You can purchase binary APIs or source code - the Lowest OCR library ownership cost!
here is the link --> http://asprise.com/product/ocr/index.php?lang=csharp
If you're ok with using an external, web-based API to do the OCR, take a look at http://www.wisetrend.com/wisetrend_ocr_cloud.shtml
Sample code in .NET (C#) to use this: http://snipt.org/lOgh/