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I want to make an offline iPhone application that can grab text from a picture. Can anyone suggest the best library which I can use. I heard ZBAR and ZXING can be used only for barcode reading. Is there any other OCR Libraries for iOS to read text from images. I expect your valuable suggestions as soon as possible.

Thanks in Advance..!

Jørgen R
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Vaisakh
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    why this question off-topic?. Isn't it related to iOS application development ? Im not clear with stack overflow rules. Please anyone tell me how this question is under off-topic. – Vaisakh Jan 07 '14 at 11:20
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    I know it's frustrating. They are doing their job, however silly it may seem. – technophyle May 07 '16 at 08:26
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    90% of scanners on appstore are based on Tesseract. If the image has noise or different background it wont work. But this app seem to work no matter what https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ocr-scan-text-from-camera/id1163617952?l=nb&ls=1&mt=8 – NoWhereToBeSeen Oct 21 '16 at 10:59
  • There is also an other OCR framework called SwiftOCR which claims it has better accuracy and low CPU usage than Tesseract: https://github.com/garnele007/SwiftOCR – Olcay Ertaş Mar 27 '18 at 06:42

2 Answers2

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Currenlty offline OCR is possible only with Tesseract

You can get source code here

Here is the good tutorial about how to use Tesseract

Also you can perform OCR on multiple language. You can dowlnoad other language trained data here

Bhumeshwer katre
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  • But I heard it is very slow and also less accurate. Is there any other perfect libraries..? – Vaisakh Jan 03 '14 at 11:50
  • also you would have to compile the lib by yourself for arm64 since i only i see libs for armv6 and amrv7... but it should not be that hard – dehlen Jan 03 '14 at 11:53
  • @Vaisakh It is not slow and also not so much fast. It is depending on how you are processing the image. Its speed totally depend on iPhone device processing speed. – Bhumeshwer katre Jan 03 '14 at 11:55
  • @Bhumeshwerkatre Do you know any tutorials that tells how to improve accuracy of Tesseract ? If you have any suggestion please help me. – Vaisakh Jan 07 '14 at 11:22
  • @Bhumeshwerkatre it's fairly expensive on the CPU to get accurate results. It gets more expensive with the more languages you add on. Even running the OCR on the medium setting on an iPhone 6s, the CPU runs up to 99% usage easily. It's also not very accurate per say. Many of the edge cases for paragraph formatting and fonts you have to manually configure in code. – TheCodingArt Sep 03 '15 at 18:51
  • It would be great to find a better solution rather a library that wasn't built for mobile usage in the first place. – TheCodingArt Sep 03 '15 at 18:52
  • @TheCodingArt agree with you. But as per research no other offline OCR was available that time. If you have any OCR available please suggest us. – Bhumeshwer katre Sep 10 '15 at 05:43
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You might want to look here. They offer a large variation of language they can detect and i heard only the best from their framework.

You can also test the framework live: live demo

Unfortunately i think it is very expensive to use this framework. But if you want an A1(all my Breaking Bad fans ;-)) framework this might be your best shot.

dehlen
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