OCR for android [closed]

Question

I am developing an android application in which i am looking for the pattern from camera which is a word of 10 character number or alphabet(just like we see in QR reader).Are there any API's available for it ?

Answer 1

From this answer, there are quite a few.

Tesjeract (http://code.google.com/p/tesjeract/), a JNI Wrapper for Tesseract (http://tesseract-ocr.googlecode.com/).

Very nice write up on this: http://www.itwizard.ro/interfacing-cc-libraries-via-jni-example-tesseract-163.html

Example of it in practice: Mezzofanti (http://code.google.com/p/mezzofanti/), an open-source Android App using Tesjeract

Answer 2

As far as i know there are no native opensource Java OCR SDKs. There are Java APIs which wrap calls for native interfaces, for example, for one of the most popular opensource OCR engines - Tesseract (http://groups.google.com/group/tesseract-ocr/) - there are some Java wrappers like tesjeract (http://code.google.com/p/tesjeract/) or Tess4J (http://tess4j.sf.net/). That could work for you, but it's rather hard to set up and will require developing image-preprocessing and font training on your side.

One more solution could be a cloud service. It requires end-user application to have the internet connection, but it's independent from your programming language choice and resources limitations. Have a look at www.ocrsdk.com for ocr in Android, it's a cloud-based OCR SDK that let you upload an image through web API and returns you the OCRed data.

This Web API based OCR SDK is not free, which may not be suitable for you, but i still recommend you try it out (it has a free 90 days trial without any upfront charges) as its pricing is really affordable in comparison with enterprise solutions while it provides enterprise-level OCR accuracy which is way better than open source.

You may also find useful this Android codesample at github (you need to get API key at http://ocrsdk.com to use it). Disclamer: i work @ ABBYY.