CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iphonexcodetextcamerascanning
Michael Levy
Michael Levy

Reputation: 51

iphone camera used in app to scan (like red laser)

I am working on an app that requires the use of a camera to scan in text. Basically without getting too detailed, I need to point the camera at something (for my purposes here I will say a license plate) and i need to point the camera at the plate, and have it somehow save the digits into a string within the app. i guess its similar to Word Lens or red laser where it doesnt actually take a picture, it just scans the view and returns information. i have not been able to find much about this so any help on how to write this kind of code would be greatly appreciated!!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1774

Answers (1)

user529758
user529758

Reputation:

This is not barcode scanning. This is called OCR (optical character recognition), and there are some free and opensource libraries available that do this.

For example, Tesseract is a complete OCR engine written in C++ (it has a C++ interface, so it can be easily used from within an iOS app).

The other solution is gocr, the GNU Optical Character Recognizer. This is supposed to be a standalone program (a command line tool), but I've had success extracting its essential parts into a library (and I used it in an iOS project of mine as well).

OpenCV is a complete computer vision library. You can implement OCR using it - just google for the adequate documentation and tutorials.

Upvotes: 2

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