Development of Optical Character Recognition Software Package for Mobile Phones

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technique through which any textual information contained in images are extracted and converted into editable text format. The various OCR software packages which are available in desktop computer with scanner suffer from one primary constraintMOBILITY. We have developed an OCR application for mobile phones. All the procedures needed for extracting the text would be performed within the mobile phone, eliminating the need for bulky devices like scanners, desktops and also laptops. Hence it would provide the user the much needed ‘anywhere, anytime’ feature for OCR. The computational power of mobiles is increasing day by day making it easier to run image processing operations for OCR application. Also the resolution of camera in mobile is increasing to match the resolution of scanners. After the document is processed, it can be communicated to another user by email facility of mobile phones as text files. The aim of this paper is to investigate the various issues involved in developing this OCR application in mobile phones. Further design and future scope for this application is elaborated giving insight to the development process. The motivation here was to provide a general purpose framework for OCR application in mobile phones. The framework is developed in a modular fashion.