How to Capture Text from Camera with Android

This guide walks you through a simple real-time text capture scenario, in which the user points the device's camera at the text to be recognized.

How it Works

The purpose of Mobile Capture SDK for OCR development is to enable your application to capture information directly from the smartphone camera preview frames, without actually snapping a picture. Once you start capturing, the Mobile Capture SDK engine will automatically receive new camera frames and process them, using each new frame to verify and improve the recognition result from the previous frame. This process is continued until the result reaches the required stability level. Combining several images enables Mobile Capture SDK to recognize text even in situation when it is hard to obtain a still photo of suitable quality for recognition.

Note that Mobile Capture SDK also supports recognizing text on an image that was already saved to a file, which allows it to process existing photos, scanned texts, and so on. See How to Recognize Text on Photos for the description of this scenario.

There are two optimal variations of the scenario, providing different instruments for text capture integration into your project:

  • Text capture scenario with a ready-to-use user interface implementation. This is a special case of a data capture scenario. the easiest to integrate case. Use this API to implement an onboarding application for capturing data from documents.
  • Text capture API for cases when a custom user interface is implemented and only the processing mechanisms are required.

Below you can find detailed "How to..." for each of these scenarios, demonstrating ABBYY Mobile Capture API usage.

02.03.2022 12:59:15

Usage of Cookies. In order to optimize the website functionality and improve your online experience ABBYY uses cookies. You agree to the usage of cookies when you continue using this site. Further details can be found in our Privacy Notice.