Mobile OCR Engine

  • Development for Mobile Platforms
    Desktop and server OCR have been established for quite some time. ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine, allows developers to integrate text recognition on mobile devices. The SDK has been designed especially for the mobile platform and enables the development for a large spectrum of applications.

  • Mobile applications that have ABBYY OCR inside are able to transform digital images of
    • documents
    • notes
    • newspaper clippings
    • business cards
    • timetables
    • menus and other text taken with a built-in camera
  • Mobile Developers can “pimp” their existing mobile apps and use the OCRed data within their own applications. So OCR
    • reduces manual text/data input by the user
    • generates a new usability of the app
    • opens a new way of dealing with information
    • At the end the application more value for users and developers can charge more for it ;o)
  • ABBYY first premiered the small code-sized version (V1.0) of its toolkit in 1999 when the technology was integrated into the C-Pen, a small hand-held pen scanner. OCR implementation in the C-Pen required less than 2 MB of disk space and was combined with the ABBYY Lingvo Russian-English dictionary.

Processing Overview

Binarisation is always executed before the character recognition

  • Original
  • Binary - Black/White Result

Requirements & Recommendations

  • To enable the OCR SDK to deliver usable results, the device should have a auto focus lens with more than 3 mega pixel
    (as usual: more = better)
  • These devices normally have CPUs with more than 500 MHz.
    (as usual: faster = better)
  • Memory:
    Exact memory requirements vary depending on the operating system and specific recognition tasks (e.g. multilingual recognition requires more memory).
    • OCR of Latin and Cyrillic characters: 8 MB ROM, 10 MB RAM;
    • Chinese and Japanese OCR: 14 MB ROM, 22 MB RAM;
    • Korean OCR: 18 MB ROM, 28 MB RAM.

Documents

Technical Specifications

Different versions of Mobile OCR Engine

Mobile OCR technology is already available for several years and the importance for light OCR technology is increasing with the growing market of smart phones.

FineReader Engine for the most operating systems is already available for 2 technology cycles :

Mobile OCR Engine for Mobile Technology Cycle CPU Types supported
Android V3, V4 ARM
Bada on request ARM
Linux V2, V3, V4 ARM, x86
Symbian V2, V3, V4 ARM
iPhone V3, V4 ARM
MacOS V4 x86
Windows Mobile V2, V3, V4 ARM
Windows V2, V3, V4 x86
MSDK for Propriety OS on request ARM, x86, porting on request

Further Information