Open Source OCR system for FPGA [closed]

Question

Do you know of any open source (open core) implementations of an OCR for FPGA either in C or in HDL? Where can I find them?

Thanks

Answer 1

As Philippe says above, you will need to find an algorithm and then port that to your FPGA.

I have never heard of an open source OCR engine for specialized hardware and I have been using OCR since 1997 when there were some European machines (CGK) with OCR in hardware. About that time they moved the OCR back into software.

You might find something here.

• http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/neural_network_ocr.aspx
• http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/simple_ocr.aspx

You also need to find an algorithm that suits the types of images you want to read. Some questions you need to ask :

• Are you reading a fixed size font ?
• Are you reading a fixed pitch or proportional font ?
• Are you processing B/W or color images ?
• What resolution or DPI images are you working with ?
• Do you need to remove background noise or color or perform thresholding ?
• Do the images need deskewing ?
• How many characters do you need ? 0-9 only or the whole alphabet ?
• How fast does it need to be ?
• How accurate does it need to be ?
• Is the text in the same place or randomly located ? If random, how do you find the text zones ?

If your needs are fairly simple then you may get away with some if the idea in the CodeProject link. Writing a good commercial OCR engine has taken many companies years of work and they are still fine tuning to improve accuracy vs speed.