Develop Reference

Tesseract character recognition problems in Android (but not on iOS?)

I've build an application that uses Tesseract (V3.03 rc1) to identify some specific text strings. These are, unfortunately, printed on a custom font that requires that I build my own traineddata file. I've built the application on both iOS (using https://github.com/gali8/Tesseract-OCR-iOS for inspiration) and Android (using https://github.com/rmtheis/tess-two/ for inspiration as well).
The workflow for both platforms is as follows:
I select a bounding box on the preview screen for where I can crop out the relevant text, and crop the image accordingly.
I use OpenCV to get a binary image (using OpenCV's adaptive threshold function with the same parameters for both platforms)
I pass this binary image to Tesseract. Both platforms (Android and iOS) use the same traineddata file.
And yet, iOS recognizes the text strings perfectly, while Android keeps misidentifying certain characters (6s for Ss, As for Hs).
On both platforms, I use the same white list string, I disable load_type_dawg and load_system_dawg, and also choose to save the blob choices.
Has anyone encountered this kind of situation before? Am I missing a setting on Android that's automatically handled in iOS? Is there something particular about Android that hasn't crossed my mind?
Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated!

So, after a lot of work, I found out what was wrong with my Android application (thankfully, it wasn't an issue with Tesseract at all). As I'm more familiar with iOS apps than Android, I wasn't sure how I could load the traineddata file onto the application without requiring the user to have the file loaded on their external storage device. I found inspiration in this project (http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/840623/Android-Character-Recognition), as they autoload the trained data file.
However, I misunderstood how it worked. I originally thought that the TessDataManager did a file lookup on the project's local tesseract/tessdata folder in order to get the trained data file (as I do this also on iOS). However, that's not what it does. It, rather, checks the internal file structure (data/data/projectname/files/tesseract/tessdata/traineddatafilegoeshere) to see if the file exists and if it doesn't, it copies over the trained data file it keeps in the Resources/Raw directory. In my case, it defaulted to the eng file, so it never read my custom font file.
Hopefully this helps someone else having similar issues. Thanks to Robin and RmTheis for all of your help!

Load OpenCV's ML (SVM) from string

I'm currently developing an algorithm for texture classification based on Machine Learning, primarily Support Vector Machines (SVM). I was able to gain some very good results on my test data and now want to use the SVM in productive environment.
Productive in my case means, it is going to run on multiple Desktop- and Mobile platforms (i.e. Android, iOS) and always somewhere deep down in native threads. For reasons of software structure and the platform's access policies, I'm not able to access the file system from where I use the SVM. However, my framework supports reading Files in an environment where access the file system is granted and channel the file's content as a std::string to the SVM-part of my application.
The standard procedure how to configure an SVM is by using filenames and OpenCV reads directly from the file:
cv::SVM _svm;
_svm.load("/home/<usrname>/DEV/TrainSoftware/trained.cfg", "<trainSetName>");
I want this (basically reading from the file somewhere else and passing the file's content as a string to the SVM):
cv::SVM _svm;
std::string trainedCfgContentStr="<get the content here>";
_svm.loadFromString(trainedCfgContentStr, "<trainSetName>") // This method is desired
I couldn't find anything in OpenCV's docs or source that this is possible somehow, but it wouldn't be the first OpenCV-Feature that's there and not documented or widely known. Of course, I could hack the OpenCV source and cross-compile to each of my target platforms, but I'd try to avoid that since it is a hell lot of work, besides I'm pretty convinced I'm not the first one with this problem.
All ideas (also unconventional) and/or hints are highly appreciated!

as long as you stick with the c++ api it's quite easy, FileStorage can read from memory:
string data_string; //containing xml/yml data
FileStorage fs( data_string, FileStorage::READ | FileStorage::MEMORY);
svm.read(fs.getFirstTopLevelNode()); // or the node with your trainset
(unfortunately not exposed to java)

Convert I18n Iphone Files to Android

I have an iOS App localized (with Localizable.strings files).
I've built now an Android version. I understand the way the i18n is made on android but I would like to avoid redoing the i18n, as almost all the Strings have the same meaning between iOS and Android.
Are there any tools that will do this conversion, or at least speed up the process?
Edit:
Ideally I would like to find a method/tool that would do the following
Input:
'iOS Localizable.strings files-(en,fr,it,pt,etc)'
'res/values/strings.xml'
Output:
'res/values-en/strings.xml'
'res/values-fr/strings.xml'
'res/values-it/strings.xml'
'res/values-pt/strings.xml'
'res/values-etc/strings.xml'

There is a specialised service here: Loco.
There are threads here on SO which deal with conversation:
Are there any tools to convert an Iphone localized string file to a string resources file that can be used in Android?
Any tool to convert Android's XML localization to iPhone's .strings file?
Another possiblity would be to use an online translation service. These services accepts text not only in Android and iPhone but also in many other formats. Upload the android text and download the iPhone text. A list of available services can be found on SO, see Any collaborative tool/website to localize an Android app? Some of these services are commercial, but even these provide a 30days test period. But note that the main focus is on translation and not on conversation.

Here is some code that does that: https://github.com/wrapp/LocalizedStrings2Android
Put it in a jar and it is ready to use.

You can use this tool I created on JSFiddle:
https://jsfiddle.net/danielgindi/x9njj9gj/
[StackOverflow requires me to write some code here because of the JSFiddle link]
Just paste in your localization strings inside the correct box, and you'll get the converted version in the other boxes (Between Android, iOS, and JS).
This tries to preserve comments too.
Cheers!

Free Fuzzy Logic Library, can't parse a file on android

I am developing an application for android/iOS/windows using c++ code for the core logic. The application uses the free fuzzy logic library and it works perfectly for windows mobile, iOS and on my local Ubuntu machine, but it doesn't quite work under android.
The application reads a .fcl file from the sd card and then parses it using the free fuzzy logic library parser. The problem is, that the parser gets stuck at random stages of parsing.
Some notes to my project settings:
I enabled the Android read/write permissions for the sdcard in the manifest.xml.
The code I am trying to run is the basic example from the free fuzzy logic library website.
I am using the stlport_static library for stl support and the -frtti compiler flag.
My question is: Am I missing something android specific, like file encoding or some permissions I didn't set?
Some notes I thought about:
File compression should not be an issues, because, to my knowledge, files on the SD card are not compressed and I can parse the file partially.
Using other fuzzy logic libraries is out of the option, because I can't use GPL licenced libraries. The only other library I found didn't hat a manual / how to and couldn't parse the fcl standard.
The free fuzzy logic library uses a lot of wchar_t's whitch could be an issue.
Thank you for your time and hopefully for some help ;)

Ok after plowing through some android manuals and some Google abuse I found the problem. Currently Android doesn't support the wchar_t type. Well you can use it, but the results will not be the same as on any other operating system.
By changing all the wchar_t and wstring types in the free fuzzy logic library to their corresponding char and string types I was able to make the parser work. Well sort of, there are still some sleight inconsistencies, but nothing i can't handle ;).
Conclusion: Don't use wide characters in android c++ Programs.
Thank you for your time & help

Create PDF / Word (Doc) file within app

Is there a definitive method of creating either a PDF or a MS Word Doc file within the app and email it immediately (and possibly, also store it).
I have been trying for quite some time and have found out the JAVA libraries: apwlibrary and iText. But both of them dont provide any tutorials of sorts.
Could anyone point me in the right direction?
EDIT: Come to think of it, is could an online PDF generator be used, first by sending the data to the service, then retrieve the result and save it on the phone?

I would recommend apache fop http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
you can use standard FOP to generate pdf.

Unless it is a core feature of your device to create a pdf file I would suggest not to do it yourself. Adding PDF creation is going to be quite a lot of work potentially depending on your performance needs. Java libraries will be easier to add but less performant. Native libraries combined with Java will be more hazzle to maintain build and bug fixing wise.
If you just need to email some information why dont you create a message text in html and use a intent to email it with the build in email program instead? Or if you want you could e.g. put the PDF generation on a server and just email a link..

I'm working right now with JasperReports, an open source library to create reports in Java and export them to PDF, DOC, XLS... Using it in conjunction with iReport to create a group of templates makes it really easy to create files filled with content from different types of sources (I'm using JavaBeans).
If you don't like the idea of having static templates (That's a bit annoying depending on your needs), you can always take a look at DynamicJasper (The examples on the website are great).
Good Luck!

I have used Apache POI. It seemed to work well. http://poi.apache.org/
This actually, http://poi.apache.org/hwpf/