Creating an OCR application - where should I begin?

simpleonline1234

simpleonline1234

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I am starting to REALLY get the hang of programming (but still have a lot to learn). I am moving on up the ladder and now I'm ready to take on OCR (optical character recognition). I know there are few apps out there but they don't really solve any captcha's so to speak.

Does anyone know where I can find some documentation on to learn where to start learning OCR?

Thanks
 
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I'm not a programmer and so I don't know exactly where to point you so maybe this will be of some help:

http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

On that page I clicked a link from the "Core Developers" section:

http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/

Maybe under "Related Projects" and/or "Resources" those links will be of some use to you.

Ignore me if I'm wrong though :)

Edit: Check out all these pages that might be of some use:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ix=tea&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=programming+an+OCR+&oq=programming+an+OCR
 
i guess you should begin by collecting images from recaptcha, yahoo etc and get someone to manually type them out, and program comparisions of how n connects to a p and how d connects to b and stuff.
 
Solving Captchas is very very hard. It is primarily a computer vision (computer science) problem and not a simple programming challenge. There are a bunch of java, php and python libraries that can solve simple captchas.

Google's recaptcha is supposedly unbeatable, which is why the outsourced manual captcha solving business is booming.
 
Tesseract is rather old program, its not that good for captcha recognition. Plus its one of the standard tools to check captcha effectiveness - i.e. once you invented a new captcha you use tesseract to check how 'breakable' it is.

I would suggest to start from academic papers on the subject in order to understand the problem you're facing.
 
There a few software out there. If you can run a program to churn out the answers sing those softwares as a slave you should be good.
 
briggers said:
Solving Captchas is very very hard. It is primarily a computer vision (computer science) problem and not a simple programming challenge. There are a bunch of java, php and python libraries that can solve simple captchas.

Google's recaptcha is supposedly unbeatable, which is why the outsourced manual captcha solving business is booming.
Click to expand...

Thats true, I'm rolling out a built-in captcha breaker for some program in the near future. And it took 3 months of 2 M.Sc. dudes to get it to 85% break rate.
 
Check out the hough transform and the Sobel operator.
 
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I'm actually working on a reCaptcha OCR right now, it's still a work in progress as far as training it to recognize overlapping characters but it's almost finished :) If you want a good "captcha" type puzzle to start out with, try making an OCR for teabag_3D. It's pretty easy, but you still have to think creatively about the problem at hand (and no crazy math stuff involved).
 
lancis said:
Thats true, I'm rolling out a built-in captcha breaker for some program in the near future. And it took 3 months of 2 M.Sc. dudes to get it to 85% break rate.
Click to expand...

As an alternative, have you considered plugging in captcha trader or bypasscaptcha into your software?
 
briggers said:
As an alternative, have you considered plugging in captcha trader or bypasscaptcha into your software?
Click to expand...

I have Death by Captcha as an option, but with 85% success rate its not really needed. You just run twice with internal solver and its done.
 
simple programming challenge. There are a bunch of java, php and python libraries that can solve simple captchas.

Google's recaptcha is supposedly unbeatable, which is why the outsourced manual captcha solving business is booming.
Click to expand...

Amazing...yeah I never knew how much went into it..but then again....with majority of high PR sites using ReCaptcha they must be doing something right to implement them into their site.
 
How will you make your captcha breaker available?
 
You should learn image processing algorithm and c# language first in order to make oCR apps
 
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