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Does anyone know of an OCR library that will run on Windows Mobile (5 or 6, but PPC2003SE would be great). I would imagine that OCR would be native (C/C++) code, but if it was in .NET or at least had a .NET wrapper API, that would be great.

+2  A: 

Seems like you're pretty much out of luck for free, mobile OCR. I did find this blog post about a free service called Scanr designed to work with camera phones but this may not be what you're after: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/04/scanr-use-camera-phones-for-ocr.html

Luke
A: 

you could try porting GOCR http://jocr.sourceforge.net/

there is an example on Code Project using an MS Office control, but that would probably mean you had to run OR off the device.

edit: Could you instead convert everything likely to be text into lines using the OpenNETCF Mobile Ink library, and then use the builtin Ink recognition? that seems the most straightforward method, and you wouldn't need to port anything, just figure out what is the stuff you want recognised.

http://community.opennetcf.com/articles/cf/archive/2007/09/28/using-the-opennetcf-mobile-ink-library-for-windows-mobile-6.aspx

Also, Tesseract and OCRopus are both open sourced from google, there is an open source wrapper for Tesseract ( http://www.pixel-technology.com/freeware/tessnet2/ ) These are all for desktop Windows but I'm sure they'd love someone did the porting to either .Net or at least got them running on WiMo.

Steven Adams
A: 

A workaround might be the use of a OCR-Server like WeOCR (http://weocr.ocrgrid.org/)

TopOCR might be worth a look, but I don't know how useful it is. It seems to be a stand alone program without an open source license.

sdfx