2010
01.19

Full OCR coming to DocScanner iPhone in few days

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Since 3.0 release Doc­Scan­ner for iPhone has had a lim­ited text recog­ni­tion fea­ture that made doc­u­ments search­able. We ended up lim­it­ing the fea­ture since the qual­ity of the OCR was lim­ited. Now we have found set of workarounds and the next release of Doc­Scan­ner is going to have full OCR support.

Obvi­ously the OCR will make some errors. Qual­ity of OCR is quite good with the 3GS. With 3G and older it will make more errors. Known lim­i­ta­tions at the moment include:

  • No sup­port for copy & paste (expect to have it soon)
  • Poor qual­ity with 3G and older
  • OCR sup­ports only Latin alh­pa­bets

As you can see in the attached PDF the rec­og­nized text is behind the the scanned image. There­fore the doc­u­ment is always good to print and read, even if the OCR has made errors. Try to select and copy text to see how OCR has done the job.

In near future we will make our best to include sup­port for Japan­ese and improve user inter­face to make it fast to use Doc­Scan­ner for cap­tur­ing text from the real world to be attached to emails, SMS mes­sages and any­where with copy & paste. Please find the attached PDF that demon­strates how it works with A4 doc­u­ment scanned with 3GS.

DocScanner-3GS-OCR-A4

If you want to help us out, please com­ment below what is your pri­mary use case for the OCR. Thanks in advance!

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3 comments so far

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  1. Reply
    paradeiser said: 2010.01.22 15:58

    either scan­ning hand­writ­ten notes or bills for archiv­ing.
    fold­ers would be nice — man­ual rota­tion (on iPhone) is really miss­ing (hor­i­zon­tally taken pic­tures are often wrong orientated)

    • Tuomas Rasila said: 2010.01.24 14:34

      Hi,

      Man­ual rota­tion is there, but the ui is not good. After scan­ning you can make cir­cle with you fin­ger and the doc­u­ment rotates. Next release 3.0.3 is out in few days and after that you can use two-finger ges­ture (sim­i­lar to Preview.app on Mac) to rotate doc­u­ments. Cur­rently we do not have plans for hand­write recog­ni­tion (only OCR), how­ever Ever­note does great job wit that.

  2. Reply
    Vince T. said: 2010.03.02 23:52

    I’m blind, and would use an iPhone with OCR to read the mail, travel timeta­bles, pos­si­bly street signs„ ingre­di­ents on food pack­ages, leaflets that come with med­ica­tion.….… maybe even some short sto­ries from a book.

    All of this would be great for pre­serv­ing my inde­pen­dence and reuc­ing my call on pub­lic services.

    The iPhone is par­tic­u­larly good for this because of the built-in text-to-speech.

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