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I'm trying to develop an iOS app that allows the user to take a photograph of a handwritten phone number. Is there any library available that will allow me to extract the numerical values from the handwriting in this picture?

Brad Larson
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rao
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    You need some OCR technology. Try googling OCR... – Liam Jun 28 '12 at 16:14
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    @all: The question has been voted down... quite un-deservedly. rao obviously is a newbie member, and he's not a native speaker, but this treatment of him is very, very unfriendly. He just asked for an OCR library that recognizes handwriting (numbers only). – Kurt Pfeifle Jun 28 '12 at 20:54
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    I link to some resources that might be of use in this question: [Is number recognition on iPhone possible in real-time?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4887313/is-number-recognition-on-iphone-possible-in-real-time) – Brad Larson Jun 28 '12 at 21:20
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    Check my answer [Are there any handwriting recognition libraries available for the iPhone?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3607827/are-there-any-handwriting-recognition-libraries-available-for-the-iphone/15950567#15950567) – Nishant Tyagi Apr 16 '13 at 05:06
  • 1 vote up for him (y) – Nhat Dinh Apr 25 '15 at 08:59

2 Answers2

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First you need to use OCR to recognize the text from the image. One of the most popular open0source libraries used for iOS OCR is a Google-sponsored open source project called tesseract.

Here's how to compile OCR for iOS:

http://robertcarlsen.net/2010/09/24/compiling-tesseract-v3-for-iphone-1299

After you get the text, do this to call the number:

NSString *phoneURLString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"tel:%@", phoneNumberFromOCR];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:phoneURLString]]];

I would put the above code in an IBAction connected to a button maybe called "Call", so when the user presses the "Call" button, this code is called and the number recognized from the image is called.

Hope this helps!

pasawaya
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Try OpenCV and tesseract-ocr. Good luck, you've got your work cut out for you.

http://opencv.org/
https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
Tony
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