How to programmatically read over a scanned document or image

Question

I\'ve searched around on the net, as I\'m a bit of a n00b when it comes to OCR, and I\'m actually not sure where a good starting point would be.

I\'d like to build a

Answer 1

What you need is Optical Mark Recognition (OMR). If you are planning a commercial software, have a look at ABBYY FlexiCapture Engine, it's an SDK for integrating data and document capture technologies in server, desktop and mobile applications. It's not free, but when it comes to business - it can add a serious value to your product.

You could also use a cloud service - a website that let you upload an image and send you back an OCR'ed data. Try www.ocrsdk.com, it is a cloud based OCR SDK recently launched by ABBYY. It's now in beta so it's completely free to use. It requires for the end user device to have an internet connection, but it's completely indepent from your programming language choice and user's device resources. There are both .NET and Java code samples avalaibe at github.

Disclamer: i work @ ABBYY.