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 Looks like it is based on some outdated version of tesseract.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.
Related
How to build the android native SDK for image to text recognition. (I have done well with some APIs from web services. But this time, I just want to make the app without any Internet Connection, no APIs, and no Web Services. Just an offline OCR app).
So my question here is
how to crop each and every word containing in the image?
how to compare the cropped text with the alphabets and characters?
You said you didn't want to use an API, however I suggest you use the recently released OCR API by Google:
https://developers.google.com/vision/text-overview
Just add the following line to your dependecies:
compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-vision:9.2.0'
Note: Upon first use it will have to download some files from a google server for it to be able to work. Make sure to add this check .isOperational(). Afterwards you can use it without an internet connection.
I guess u can use Tesseract OCR Tool, an open source alternative by Google. How to integrate that in Android is simple via Tesseract Android Tools
Have a look at the tess-two project on github, it's very easy to use and gives good OCR results
You can use ML Kit for Image to Text Recognition:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/ml-kit/android/recognize-text
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.
I want to integrate one of image search api for finding similar image like a google goggles do?
#Chrish -- Check this
http://www.technotalkative.com/android-google-image-search-api-example-json-parsing-web-api-call-demo/
visual search api for web and mobile here too: http://www.macroglossa.com/api.html. they provide custom services too.
Or just Check replies for this question
Google goggles API
IQ Engines offers an API that allows you to integrate image recognition into your mobile application. For more information see http://www.iqengines.com. If you sign up for a trial you get 1000 free visual scans and can download the iOS and Android SDKs. There's a Quick Start Guide http://www.iqengines.com/quickstart, API Documentation and README files for the SDKs that explain the process.
I'm trying to put a text document with highscores inside a bucket on the google cloud storage. So far, so good.
Now I want my app to open this textfile in the bucket, check if there is a new highscore, adapt the file and write it back into the bucket.
I´m trying to find example code, since that makes more sense to me for understanding than the apis, but I´m not able to find it.
The answers I get are all, it´s just simple get and put callbacks, but since it ain't simple for me, I was hoping somebody has a link to an example for an android app using google cloud storage and reading and writing online.
I found this information, but would love to see an example for android in eclipse: http://code.google.com/intl/nl-NL/appengine/docs/python/googlestorage/functions.html
If I'm creating an app in Eclipse, can I use the bucket in the google cloud? Or don't I or future users have access to that bucket for read and write?
Look at the Google api client libraries for java. Google storage has a Json Api (currently in beta and you must email to get turned on). The client libs are fairly straight forward once you get your head around it. All google apis are accessed in the same manner. You can use the Android Tasks example to learn from and apply it to Google Storage Api.
http://code.google.com/p/google-api-java-client/wiki/APIs#Tasks_API
Since you want to change files, I would advise to use Google Appengine's Blobstore or either save images as BlobProperty in GAE. CloudStorage is more for static files, I believe.
Is there a way to use Google Image Search API from Android application?
Official page (http://code.google.com/apis/imagesearch/) talks about using the API from a website. I'd like to use it from android application. I'd like to get URL of a first image for the specified keyword which will user enter in my applicaton. Thanks!
Update:
this api is no longer valid and has been replaced with a custom search engine that is probably not what you are looking for
I can't see any reason you can't use the normal REST/JSON interface Google has documented (intended for Flash webapps but seems legal to use for other non-Javascript purposes too).
According to Google:
The Google Image Search JSON interface, and this guide, are provided for Flash developers, and all other developers who need to access Image Search from other Non-JavaScript environments.
Seems like Android would qualify, assuming you meet all the other TOS requirements like attribution, user-generated queries, and so on.