I’m still remembering it well, the first piece of software I wrote when I came to the US was a de-skewing algorithm. Deskewing an image helps a lot, if you want to do OCR, OMR, barcode detect, or just improve the readability of scanned images.
At the time, I was working for a small software company, developing TeleForm, an application...
“Your father’s light saber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times… before the Empire.”
While the Android...
Ever since I started working on the Android platform and Android phone and tablet applications, I found it challenging to show my ideas, designs, and prototypes to a group of people, no matter how small that group was. Naturally, I wanted to not just explain concepts and behaviors but to show a live demo on a phone. However, the screen-size...
Occasionally, I speak at developer conferences, and recently have talked about how to add printing as feature into Android applications. As an example, I take a pretty simple application with only a few Android Activities and then show how a print intent can be integrated for mime types like image/* or application/pdf. After such a talk I...
At the time, I was working for a small software company, developing TeleForm, an application that reads data from paper forms and stores that data in previously created databases. The Cardiff TeleForm product was later re-branded Verity-TeleForm for a brief period in 2004 and 2005 when Verity Inc. acquired Cardiff Software. In 2005, when Autonomy acquired Verity, the Cardiff brand was reintroduced as Autonomy Cardiff (http://www.cardiff.com); more recently, Autonomy was acquired by HP.
Image Deskew is the process of removing skew from images (especially bitmaps created using a scanner). Skew is an artifact that can occur in scanned images because of the camera being misaligned, imperfections in the scanning or surface, or simply because the paper was not placed completely flat when scanned.
Now most of the data entry or origination happens on the Web, where most of the forms processing has been moved to as well, i.e. OCR hasn’t been in vogue for quite a while. However, the popularity of smartphones, combined with built-in high-quality cameras has created a new category of mobile applications, benefiting greatly from OCR. Take Word-Lens (http://questvisual.com) as an example: an augmented reality translation application that tries to find out what the letters are in an image and then looks in a dictionary, to eventually draws the words back on the screen in translation.
On Device or In The Cloud ?
Before deciding on an OCR library, one needs to decide, where the OCR process should take place: on the Smartphone or in the Cloud. Each approach has its advantages.
On device OCR can be performed without requiring an Internet connection and instead of sending a photo, which can potentially be huge (many phones have 8 or 12 Mega-Pixel cameras now), the text is recognized by an on-board OCR-engine.
My name is Wolf Paulus, a photographer, hiker, hacker, technologist based in Ramona, California.
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