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I was wondering if it is possible to get text (like an NSString) from a picture in iOS. So like if you took a picture of the words "Hello World" the code would convert the image into an NSString with the words "Hello World". For my purposes it wont matter if it is not case sensitive but I would like to know if it is possible and if so, then how.

Thanks.

rmaddy
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Marzukr
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    You are going to want to look into OCR software with an open API. – Kevin DiTraglia Jul 26 '13 at 14:17
  • the Objective-C is a very powerful language, so the anwser is **yes, it is possible**, you can write algorithm which gets the text back from an image in iOS. – holex Jul 26 '13 at 14:22
  • Yep, you need to find a package that supports OCR. Presumably there are several suitable open-source OCR packages on the web, either in Objective-C or in C++. The main problem is you might have to try several before you find one suited to your needs. – Hot Licks Jul 26 '13 at 14:30

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I would look into this https://github.com/nolanbrown/Tesseract-iPhone-Demo and stack overflow has some posts about this already like Getting text from image on ios (image processing)

Community
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It is possible.

You would use OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

Because OCR is a broad and complex topic, the question of "how to" is probably too vague for S.O. You should probably do some research, make some prototypes, and develop some more specific follow up questions.

Alfie Hanssen
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  • Thanks for the answer, I will take your advice and do some more research as well as looking into the link @jonathan gave me. – Marzukr Jul 26 '13 at 14:48
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One of the main open source libraries used to do OCR on iOS is a google-sponsored open source project called tesseract.

Here is some info on compiling tesseract for use in iOS apps:

tesseract

The same guy has a nice sample project on github demonstrating how a simple client might use the compiled library:

Pocket-OCR

Rajeev Barnwal
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