Develop Reference

Using Android-Vision to detect Hebrew

I'm trying to create a simple application such as in the tutorial for the android vision API, only to recognize Hebrew, instead of English.
so far, from what i searched mobile vision api, and from playing around with other languages, the application recognize many Latin based languages (French, Spanish, for example) but no non-Latin character languages i tried (Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic comes to mind).
the question is, is it possible to use Google's mobile vision to read non-Latin text? if yes, how would i change my simple app to read other type of characters? and if not, what are my alternatives? i have found tessaract and Google cloud vision, but i prefer to have as little interaction with outside sources as i can, i want the app to be installed and used freely without relaying on outside engines or servers, any help and pointing in the right direction is appreciated.

Mobile vision OCR doesn't support non-latin languages.
here's a link to official documentation.
https://developers.google.com/vision/text-overview
You can use Google Cloud Vision for the required purpose but it would require internet connectivity. For now, most of the OCR supported APIs require internet connectivity, If you find any with more language support as compared to Mobile vision, please answer to your question here.

google vision OCR text detection

I am using google vision API for text detection and I get the expected result for English but when test on Arabic I get no result, I found in google decumentation that it support many languages includes Arabic by using parameter languagehint ar
but i don't know where to use this parameter.
I use this tutorial.

Till the date Google Mobile Vision API does not support Arabic language. Please refer below link
https://developers.google.com/vision/text-overview

Google Vision API: OCR of non-language text

I'd like to write android application for text recognition in images from camera. However, text to be recognized does not consist of regular words, it's just a sequence of letters, digits, slashes, etc. Is it still possible to use Google Vision API for this task? Or should I look for some other tools? I have read about tessaract library, but Google Vision seems to be easier for beginner developer. Would it give significant boost in accuracy of recognition?

I can confirm that at least the sample OCR reader that google supplies can read non-language text strings. I have been using it to read VIN numbers, for instance.

Optical Character Recognition using Google Drive API

I am working on an android application. I want to scan a receipt and read the characters, basically do optical character recognition. I read that google drive provides this functionality with their drive APIs & I wish to use Google drive API for this but I am not able to find any tutorial to understand how to achieve this. Can anyone help me with how to start with this.
Thanks
P

There is no tutorial. Images (png, jpg) that you upload to Google Drive (from any app, Android, Web ....) are processed by OCR and indexed by Google. You can test it yourself, just upload a few images that contain text, wait for a while and try to search for words contained in it. Your Android app can use the same facility, but you have to stay with the RESTful API, namely fulltext search. AFAIK, this type of search is not yet available in the new GDAA API.

Using Google Docs OCR for other things on Android

I am thinking of capturing some text from documents using my android phone and was looking for an ideal OCR app on android. I just happened to read today that Google introduced OCR for scanning documents that can be edited in Google Docs. I was wondering if I could use the OCR for things other than converting the documents to Google Docs - say, like taking a picture of a certificate and capturing the names and dates of birth of the candidates or taking a photo of a license plate and be able to get the info as text that can be stored.
If anyone has an idea of how to achieve this on Android using Google's OCR, that would be great to know. I did read about Tesseract/Tesjeract but it seems very difficult to implement what I want using it - maybe I didnt fully understand how to use it through Java. Here's the link to the new app that uses OCR to scan documents - Google Docs on Android

We have tried Google Docs API a wile ago, but it is very weak in terms of accuracy. Looks like it is based on some outdated version of tesseract. I suppose you would get more accuracy if you try tesseract. However, you will need to manage special preprocessing of images taken by camera since they introduce additional challenges. Google Docs API does not have that.
On running Tesseract on Android look here:
Using tesseract on android
Commertial alternative to tesseract for OCR on mobile phone:
http://www.abbyy.com/mobileocr/
However, if you are looking not into just capturing text, but also exptracting data, then you may need additional technology to parse text output. That means writing even more code. Or there is alternative to license existing commertial Data Capture API from ABBYY. That was already discussed here:
Recognise text in certain position using the Iphone camera
Disclaimer: I work for ABBYY

You can use Google Docs (now called Google Drive) to OCR an image by uploading the image to Google Drive. Later you can pull this Google Document back as a text/rtf/doc/html file. This data now - you may use however you like in your app. This can be achieved directly without user intervention using Google Drive APIs. Here are some Google App API references:
To upload with OCR: see
Fail to upload a image file into 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 there should be a quota in place to use the OCR service.