Experimental app for optical character recognition (OCR) This app is an experimental app that I developed several years ago that demonstrates use of the Tesseract OCR engine to recognize text in images captured by the device camera. This app runs OCR on your device – without uploading your images to a server – and is suitable for recognizing individual words or short phrases of text, but this app is intended for hobbyists and software developers interested in OCR and not for general audiences. In contrast to Google's Mobile Vision API, this app is able to recognize text printed in non-Latin-based fonts while offline. To achieve this, this app incorporates an unusually large amount of training data for several languages. This training data is stored on your phone, and this app takes up much more space than ordinary apps. No image pre-processing is performed by this app before handing off captured image frames to Tesseract, so the app is not tuned for any specific use case and, as a result, its recognition accuracy and speed is heavily dependent on situational factors like perspective, lighting, and font type. Source code for this app is available on GitHub (with minor changes to accommodate GitHub file size restrictions). The code for this app is a combination of open source camera-related code from the ZXing bar code scanner project and open source optical character recognition code from the Tesseract OCR project. TEXT CAPTURE The default single-shot capture runs OCR on a snapshot image that's captured when you click the shutter button, like a regular photo. When the "continuous preview" checkbox is checked, the app shows a dynamic, real-time display of what the device is recognizing right beside the camera viewfinder. The continuous preview mode works best on a fast device. USING THIS APP • Point the device at a small region of text and touch the on-screen shutter button to start OCR. • For recognizing individual Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters, set the page segmentation mode to "single character." RECOGNITION ACCURACY • Various factors can cause the OCR to fail: uneven illumination, stylized text, or text without enough contrast from the background. Try to have good lighting. • Hold the device steady, and be sure the picture is in focus. • If you need to scan a large block of text or an entire document, try a document scanning app such as Text Fairy instead. LANGUAGES • This app supports several languages/scripts not recognized by Google Translate. • Supported languages for OCR: Afrikaans Albanian Amharic Arabic Assamese Azerbaijani Azerbaijani (Cyrillic) Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Catalan Cebuano Cherokee Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Dzongkha English English, Middle (1100-1500) Esperanto Estonian Finnish Frankish French French, Middle (ca. 1400-1600) Galician Georgian Georgian - Old German Greek, Ancient (-1453) Greek, Modern (1453-) Gujarati Haitian Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Inuktitut Irish Italian Italian - Old Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Malayalam Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Oriya Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Sanskrit Serbian Serbian (Latin) Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Spanish Spanish - Old Swahili Swedish Syriac Tagalog Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Tibetan Tigrinya Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Uzbek (Cyrillic) Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish SAMSUNG DEVICE NOTES • On Samsung Galaxy devices, you may need to long-press the menu button to set preferences.
VERSION HISTORY
- Version 0.5.14 posted on 2014-05-11
- Version 0.4.3 posted on 2011-05-13
Several fixes and updates
Program Details
- Category: Development > Components & Libraries
- Publisher: Robert Theis
- License: Free
- Price: N/A
- Version: 0.6.0
- Platform: android