I want to develop an iPhone application that is going to convert some sort of images to text formats. I want to know that is there any built-in library for achieving this purpose?
I suppose you are asking about recognizing text from images (OCR) and not about something like encoding image file into base64
There's no build-in OCR libraries in iPhone.
Depending on your budget and what accuracy you trying to achieve, you can try
Commertical OCR - MSDK from ABBYY http://abbyy.com/mobileocr/iphone - high accuracy, customer support, etc. but costs money. Disclaimer: I work for ABBYY
Open Source OCR - Tesseract http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ - completely free, but less accurate. This sample shows how to run it on iPhone: https://github.com/nolanbrown/Tesseract-iPhone-Demo
I have used tesseract. Its accuracy ranges from 0-100% depending upon various factors like how well the image is captured,fonts and color of the text etc.
But it can give you very good result if you have a very clear image with very clear text.
Related
I am working on an app that needs to translate the text of an image in realtime with the iphone camera.Is there any way to implement it? any sdk or tutorial will be helpful.
My suggestion would be a combination of the following:
The open-source Tesseract OCR engine for getting the text from the image(Quite recent iOS wrapper here: https://github.com/ldiqual/tesseract-ios)
One of the translation services discussed in this question for translations: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6151668/alternative-to-google-translate-api
E.g. a tutorial like this on how to get a real-time camera view with overlays: http://www.musicalgeometry.com/?p=1273
Please note that these are just ideas on how to do this with as fast progress as possible.
Some apps that offer real-time translations even try to find a suitable font and display the translated text at the exact same position as the original text was. I am afraid that this is not possible without investing lots of work and developing your own OCR engine.
Hope this helps.
Does using libraries like OpenEars will drastically enlarge my app size? Or I can just extract the text to speech stuff, and get away with it...Probably removing all those langs? I don't have any idea.
I checked and OpenEars sample app is 33MB - which is big!
So my question is - can I implement text to speech in my app without compromising the size so much? I mean I can live with 2-3 MBs but 30...
Thank you!
OpenEars developer here. Just follow the instructions here to reduce your final app size, there's no need to ship all the voices or any features of the framework that you aren't making use of. Depending on which voices you're using and which feature, you might see an app size increase of between 6 megs and ~20 unless you're using a large number of the available voices. The sample app uses all of the framework features and two voices, and supports a few iOS versions, so its binary size reflects that.
My guess is you can't, audio will take up a lot of space.
Removing unneeded language will free some space but 2-3 mb for all the audio guess that isen't really possible.
I have used the library for reading barcode from image. But can't find any source or help for reading numbers from image.
I just need to take photo with camera and then process image whether any numbers exist and read out the numbers.
Is there any way to get the number written on image?
that's OCR type of problem. you might want to take a look at: Is there any good OCR API for iPhone and/or Android phones? or iPhone: Regarding OCR technology?
The Google Docs API has some OCR support. You may want to take a look at this and see if you can implement it: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-docs-ocr.html I don't remember if Apple will allow you to use any external libraries though.
I'm thinking of developping a mobile OCR app to detect words from mobile pictures.
The purpose if only to detect what words are in the picture, the layout is not important.
Also it would be use on very short texts.
I'm currently thinking of adapting tesseract to iphone and android.
I wonder if anyone has had any related experience? What are the limits etc.
Thanks!
Google Goggles does that... It takes a snapshot, reduces the color depth, scans through various contrast ratios, and exposes letters/words. It then performs a google search on what it found.
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/
i run it on my G1 and it's OK for single words, but it is very slow if you have 2-3 lines.
maybe with new phones (dual-core ones) you might get several lines in some seconds
i wanna ask that , is there any api to recognize image?
i need read data from image...can i read numbers which is printed on image..
It seems as though there is no built in function for OCR and this would have to be a custom aspect not found in foundation.
Good luck!
You can always download an open-sourced, external library (package) to do the OCR. GOCR is one example.
There are many OCR libraries available for reading text from an image. You can check my answer Mobile OCR Engine for iPhone app
and for reading numbers only check my answer How to read numbers only in an image
Hope it helps you.