Looking for OCR API on mobile platform

Question

I'm looking for an OCR library that runs on Android, iOS & Windows Phone.

My app scans the image to find certain information on it. For example, scan a parking ticket to get time information on it.

Tesseract is free and open source, but need port to Android, iOS & Windows Phone. Also need to tweak to improve the accuracy.

Camscanner API is not free, but looks much better: - Support Android and iOS apps. - Test CamScanner App, it's very accurate.

Is there any other tool available(both free and commercial)?

Answer 1

Pay attention for products by ABBYY:

• ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine is highly-accurate OCR SDK. It supports Android and iOS, works on device.
• ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK is platform-independent OCR SDK, works in cloud.

Answer 2

If you are looking to use a commercial product you should check out LEADTOOLS Mobile SDK. You will be able to develop in either Android, iOS or Window's Phone.

Here is some sample code of how you would recognize text using Android OCR:

OcrEngine mOcrEngine = OcrEngineManager.createEngine(OcrEngineType.ADVANTAGE);
mOcrEngine.startup(null, null, null, OCR_RUNTIME_DIRECTORY);

ILeadStream leadStream = LeadStreamFactory.create(this.getResources().openRawResource(R.raw.ocr1_tif), true);
RasterImage rasterImage = mOcrEngine.getRasterCodecsInstance().load(leadStream, 1);

ocrPage = mOcrEngine.createPage(image, OcrImageSharingMode.AUTO_DISPOSE);
ocrPage.recognize(this);
String results = ocrPage.getText(-1);

Below is a screenshot of the LEADTOOLS OCR Demo running on Android

Scanned Image:

OCR Results:

Disclaimer: I am an employee of this product