CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidocrandroid-cameratesseract
Kevin D.
Kevin D.

Reputation: 1510

Creating a camera activity optimized / suitable for OCR

I'm trying to create a camera activity for taking photos to be OCR'd. Here's what I wish to accomplish:

  1. A resizable box in the middle of the camera preview to indicate which particular area will be created into a Bitmap and processed by the OCR engine.
  2. Continuous autofocus (done)

I'm using tesseract btw.

If anyone would care to point me to some reference / examples / tutorials, that would be great.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2792

Answers (3)

Nikolay
Nikolay

Reputation: 2214

There can be two general approaches.

You can resize the image before sending it to OCR engine. Keep in mind that Tesseract engine you use has some kind of feature - it requires some space between characters and image borders, sometimes more than expected.

The second approach is to use field-level recognition, when you specify coordinates of the text block and send the full image to OCR engine. Have a look at http://www.ocrsdk.com, it's a cloud OCR SDK with web api recently launched by ABBYY, it's in beta, so for now it's free to use. It has a field level recognition methods and Android code samples. I work @ ABBYY and can provide additional info on our products if necessary

Upvotes: 0

nont
nont

Reputation: 9519

I've been doing something similar. Right now, I'm just sending the whole photo to a webservice and processing it with OCRfeeder, which will perform segmentation on the image and send each part with text in it to tesseract. I've been getting much better accuracy that way. In addition, you might want to perform some preprocessing to clean up the image first.

Upvotes: 1

rmtheis
rmtheis

Reputation: 5826

There's a viewfinder rectangle here:

https://github.com/rmtheis/android-ocr/blob/master/android/src/edu/sfsu/cs/orange/ocr/CaptureActivity.java

Upvotes: 3

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