Brainstorm http://maemo.org/community/brainstor.../ocr_for_n900/

Update 07-April-2008:
Attached the debian package below.

After installation run it through, MaemoPad in Extras menus
Changes made(compared to the binary)
Word wrap
Support for texts with more than 2K characters. Still limited , upto only 10K

Update 06-April-2008:
I have integrated the GNU OCR engine with maemopad. A menu item (to open PNM) and menu tab item (to do the same has been added). As you can see in the screen shots these open PNM(image) files. I am working on adding support to most image formats(jpeg,tiff, png, bmp etc etc) I have the Netpbm library compiled but somehow the other fileformat are not working. For now I can only provide the source code and binary. I will try to pack it into deb once I get sometime to figure it out. For now it seems to work fine. You can read upto 2048 characters. But this can be changed easily in the later releases.

Screenshots
Menu Option


Source Image (Chapter 1, The Manifesto)


OCR Result


As you can see, more work to be done on work wrapping, aligning paragraphs, new line etc. Its about 3 times slower when compared to a Pentium 4 1.8GHz, 512MB , fedora 8 system. Just used the basic "time" command.

Package( binary, source, test images)
http://rapidshare.com/files/105337245/mocr.tar.gz.html

-----------------------------------------

Hi,
I have successfully ported GNU OCR
http://jocr.sourceforge.net/

Here are the source files
http://rapidshare.com/files/10519004...mo.tar.gz.html

and a sample pnm to test it
http://rapidshare.com/files/105190569/ocr-b.pnm.html

and the binary for os2008 for n800,
http://rapidshare.com/files/105190878/gocr.html


And the results!

Test Image: ocr-b.pnm



Nokia-N800-51-3:~# ./gocr ocr-b.pnm
nBcDEFGHIJKLmNoRsTuvwxyznöü
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzäöüß
1234S6789O !''%&/()≡?\(}[I+*#'
<,;.:-

That's pretty cool... actually, I've been wondering if there is any barcode scanning software that could work from a photo taken by a NIT...

I've written something in MATLAB (I want to be able to scan book barcodes and compare them to a database of my books) if you're interested. I'm planning on 'porting' it to Python, which shouldn't be too painful, I've just not got round to it yet.

Give me a shout if you'd like to see the MATLAB code and get it working on the device.

mikevraziel.

I used OCR on PC's but new to linux. Can you tell me what I need to do to get it loaded and running. Is there a .deb that you could provide. Any guidance, help would be greatly appreciated. Dan

I am looking into it too. At first attempt I would like to develope a mplayer-gui (wat ever the mplayer gui is called )
I am new to deb based systems. i use fedora and it would be really nice if someone can point me to where i can find information on making a deb package. sorry if this question has been answered before ! I really cant seem to find it. I did google for "maemo how to deb" or "maemo pack to deb".

lardman,

excellent, but I'm knee deep in getting the basics going on my NIT right now. Your ISBN application is great. Have you heard of Amazon's TextBuyIt service just announced? Eventually I'd also like to consider scanning UPC symbols. For now it's good to know this idea is in the oven.

mike,

Can't help much on packaging, though the bdist_debian section here links to some handy info on getting your own repo going. I think the packaging itself is specific to python sw.

http://home.cfl.rr.com/genecash/nokia/

lardman,
i think gnu ocr is capable of scanning barcodes. i will check that later today. ideally i would like to have an application like ABBY Finereader may be with some translation support.

I am going to Paris next month, hopefully i will be able to read my menu without my gf mocking me :P

GNU Octave (a MATLAB equivalent, with strong compatibility) has been available off and on for the ITs; it's probably slower than reimplementing, even in an interpreted language, but might be easier...
Anyway, any chance you could post it? or please PM me with it, if you're not interested in posting it publicly (for whatever reason)...

If it looks easy enough, I'll most likely re-implement it in C, and get a CLI/scriptable engine going, and let someone else make a python or C/GTK front-end.

THAT is freaking SWEET!