Is there a library that can do raster to vector conversion, for the iPhone?

Question

I am trying to take an image and extract hand written text so that it can be read easily and zoomed in on. I would like to convert the text to vector paths.

I am not aware of any libraries that would make this as painless as possible. Any help is greatly appreciated. Examples are nice too :)

Answer 1

The only program I know of for the iPhone that does handwriting recognition is HWPEN. Unfortunately, it's not a library but a full application and (to make matters worse) it requires a Jailbroken phone.

I fear you must either try to get the source for HWPEN or reverse engineer it to obtain the code you need.

Barring that, you may want to write your own. There are several studies on handwriting recognition that may help.

Answer 2

Simple iPhone Image Processing (on Google code) contains all the primitive tools you will need:

• Canny edge detection
• Histogram equalisation
• Skeletonisation
• Thresholding, adaptive and global )
• Gaussian blur (used as a preprocessing step for canny edge detection)
• Brightness normalisation
• Connected region extraction
• Resizing - uses interpolation