Text Results (formatting has not been altered other than the font.) Moby Dick from the KNFB reader:Ĭall me Ishmael. The original document is a plain, single column, black text on a white background, laserprinted document in a 10 point Arial font. The first document is one many will be familiar with. All documents were scanned under normal office florescent lighting on a desk with a plain light grey background. The first result is the output from the KNFB reader on a Nokia N82 cellular phone and the second is the output from the Prizmo app on an iPhone 4. The following is a comparison of the OCR results on three different types of documents. The KNFB Reader in comparison is $995 US, or about 77 times the price. The application was only $10 and the speech output for the application was only an additional $3, so I decided to foot the bill and give it a try. He saids quite simply, “no.” because the quality of the phones camera wasn’t sufficient.īut this new recommendation got me to wondering if perhaps the Prizmo application might work better than past iPhone OCR applications. Secondly, at a recent trade show I had met an executive from the company which manufactured the KNFB mobile reader and had asked him if they plan to release their KNFB mobile reader software as an iPhone app now that the iPhone had a five megapixel camera. I had seen it work when it was being demonstrated on a technology tour, and had been less than impressed with the OCR results. First, I had another supplier who had, in the last year come out with an OCR app for the iPhone for people with low vision. I was dubious however about OCR on the iPhone for two reasons. It was, according to some, the best OCR application available for the iPhone. I went online and I looked for reviews of the Prizmo app and found them to be quite favorable. The iPhone has a five megapixel digital camera which should be high enough resolution for OCR applications. I love my iPhone and I have an iPad at home that I’m never able to use because I can’t pry it out of the hands of my children. No matter how good the Prizmo app was, there was no way it would be effective on an iPad. The iPad has a 720P high definition camera, which is only the equivalent to. To have effective OCR on any kind of camera type device you need a minimum of the five megapixel camera. This later evolved into software which could be installed on selected Nokia cell phones.īecause of my experience with these types of devices I noticed one immediate flaw in the recommendation. The first device of this kind was the KNFB Reader, which married a digital camera to a PDA. Only recently have we been able to use portable devices to provide OCR. I have some experience with OCR applications having worked with them for more than 20 years.
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