ABBYY Brings Android™ Support To Its Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 Software Development Kit
ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software, recently announced its Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 software development kit (SDK). ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine gives developers powerful tools for creating mobile or other compact applications enhanced with optical character recognition (OCR) and business card recognition (BCR) functions.
ABBYY's small-footprint OCR technology automatically transforms images of text and documents captured with a digital camera into editable and searchable text, eliminating the need to input information manually. Using the innovative BCR functionality, developers can create mobile applications to transfer data from images of business cards directly to the phone address book. OCR and BCR capabilities can be embedded into any camera-based devices including mobile phones, communicators, PDAs, digital cameras and portable scanners.
In addition to the support for many popular mobile platforms such as Windows® Mobile, Symbian® LINUX® and others, ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 now enables developers to readily add OCR and BCR functions to Android-based applications.
"We have been observing an increasing interest in Android among device manufacturers, and we anticipate growing demand for sophisticated mobile OCR applications for this innovative platform," said Katya Solntseva, director of mobile products department at ABBYY. "Our Mobile OCR Engine is a powerful development kit that allows developers to create a wide range of smart, easy-to-integrate mobile applications, from simple end user programs to complex business solutions."
ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine enables developers to extend the capabilities of various mobile devices and applications in many ways. For example, using a camera phone with an OCR application, clippings from magazines, books, receipts, ads and other documents can be captured and automatically converted into text, which can then be edited, stored or sent via email or SMS. The captured and recognized text can be further used in other mobile and PC applications including notepads, calendars, libraries and so on. Developers can also easily leverage the BCR functions of the new SDK and expand them to a broader use. For instance, they can create solutions that not only capture and export business card information, but also synchronize the data with other contact information management applications on the PC or server.
Designed with the needs of mobile solution providers in mind, ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 combines strong platform support with powerful technology innovations to optimize software performance and accuracy, and minimize the use of hardware resources. The SDK provides powerful recognition technology including a new Document Analysis algorithm to ensure more accurate and faster OCR processing, combined with enhanced capability to reproduce the structure of the original text such as columns and paragraphs. It also delivers improved image pre-processing capabilities including skew correction and image binarization, as well as the capability to detect noise on the original image.
To ensure extensive international reach of mobile OCR applications, the SDK recognizes 58 languages with Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters. In addition, it provides dictionaries created specifically for BCR in 16 languages including newly added Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish.
ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine (previously known as ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK) recently won the Silver Mobile Star Award from MobileVillage® for the Best Enterprise Software: Data Capture/Collection. For more information, visit www.ABBYY.com/mobileOCR .
About ABBYY
ABBYY is a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software. Its products include the ABBYY FineReader line of optical character recognition (OCR) applications, ABBYY FlexiCapture line of data capture solutions, ABBYY Lingvo dictionary software, and development tools. Paper-intensive organizations from all over the world use ABBYY software to automate time- and labour-consuming tasks and to streamline business processes. ABBYY products are used in large-scale government projects such as those of Australian Taxation Office, Lithuanian Tax Inspectorate, Ministry of Education of Russia, Ministry of Education of Ukraine, and Montgomery County Government of the USA. Companies that license ABBYY technologies include BancTec, Canon, EMC/Captiva, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Samsung Electronics and more. ABBYY OCR applications are shipped with equipment from the world's top manufacturers such as BenQ, Epson, Fujitsu, Fuji Xerox, Microtek, Panasonic, Plustek, Toshiba, and Xerox. ABBYY is headquartered in Moscow, Russia, with offices in Germany, the United States, Ukraine, the UK, Japan and Taiwan. For more information, visit www.ABBYY.com.
SOURCE: ABBYY