What kind of OCR Java library should I use in Android? [closed]

Question

I would like to build an Android application that, via an OCR library, should scan a picture extracting text from it .

What Java library should I use?

Elaelaborate

Google recently released an API to achieve this: developers.google.com/vision/text-overview – Bunyabunya

Answer 1

Don't know how good it is (it definitely needs to be trained first), but there is Ron Cemer's Java OCR library.

Animated

Answer 2

If you are looking for a very extensible option or have a specific problem domain you could consider rolling your own using the Java Object Oriented Neural Engine.

I used it successfully in a personal project to identify the letter from an image such as this, you can find all the source for the OCR component of my application on github, here.

Boorish

Answer 3

try tesseract, checkout this article http://www.itwizard.ro/interfacing-cc-libraries-via-jni-example-tesseract-163.html and this example http://code.google.com/p/mezzofanti/

Edit: some more facts - tesseract is one of the best open source OCR used by google - there is training data available for many languages - mezzofanti is an android app that uses tesseract - beware: OCR does use a lot of CPU power. trying to OCR a A4 page with your T-Mob G1 will take a lot of time and the result may not impress you ;-)

Blowzed

tesseract does work but its reading ability is quite poor for even the simplest text. – Leflore

thats why you have to train it @Leflore - I was able to get good results with the default training while implementing ISBN reader. Try this link, I didn't use their experiences yet but I have it in my bookmarks for a long time And I think it is good source od info vbridge.co.uk/2012/11/05/… – Gherardo

Answer 4

You can use the OCR feature from Google Docs. Check the Documents List Data API http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#OCR

Diphyodont