Using Google Docs OCR for Other Things on Android

Question

I am thinking about grabbing some text from documents using my Android phone, and was looking for the perfect OCR app for Android. It recently seemed to me that Google introduced OCR to crawl documents that can be edited in Google Docs. I was wondering if I can use OCR for other purposes than to convert documents to Google Docs - say, for example, take a snapshot of the certificate and write down the names and dates of birth of the candidates or photograph the license plate and am able to get the information as text that can be saved .

If anyone has an idea on how to achieve this on Android using Google OCR, that would be great to know. I read about Tesseract / Tesjeract, but it seems to me very difficult to implement what I want to use, maybe I did not quite understand how to use it through Java. Here's a link to a new application that uses OCR to scan documents - Google Docs on Android

Answer 1

We tried the Google Docs API for a long time, but it is very weak in terms of accuracy. It seems to be based on some outdated version of tesseract. I guess you get more accuracy if you try tesseract. However, you will need to control the special preprocessing of images taken by the camera, as they create additional problems. The Google Docs API does not have this.

When launching Tesseract on Android, see here: Using tesseract for android

The primary tesseract alternative for OCR on a mobile phone: http://www.abbyy.com/mobileocr/

However, if you are looking for not only text capture, but also data extraction, you may need additional technology to analyze text output. This means writing even more code. Or there is an alternative to licensing the existing Commertial Data Capture API from ABBYY. This has already been discussed here:

Recognize text at a specific position using the iPhone camera

Disclaimer: I work for ABBYY

Answer 2

You can use Google Docs (now called Google Drive) to display the image by uploading the image to Google Drive. You can later return this Google Doc as a text / rtf / doc / html file. This data is now - you can use as you like in your application. This can be achieved directly without user intervention using the Google Drive APIs. Here are some Google API API links:

Download using OCR: see
Unable to upload image file to Google Doc via java api with? convert = true
To download a file from Google Drive: https://developers.google.com/google-apps/documents-list/#downloading_documents_and_files https://docs.google.com/feeds/download/documents/Export?docID=__INSERT-ID__&exportFormat=txt&format=txt

Beware of having a quota for using the OCR service.