Optical character recognition on the iPhone

Question

Is it possible on an iPhone app to take a picture and extract an string from the picture? We'd like to make our app to look for a serial number on a database (very long number) without the user having to type it.

Is there any Cocoa/Objective-C API for this or any C/C++ library that can be used in an iPhone app?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You can have a look at the tesseract-ocr project. It's not actually made to use on an iPhone but I believe others have made great use of it on the iPhone.

Here is a demo that makes use of the tesseract ocr engine.

Answer 2

I was looking for something similar and came across ABBYY's mobileOCR solution I've not used it yet and have no idea how much it is but you should be able to integrate it into your app by all accounts.