Optical character recognition as an approach to retrieve information on books

Abstract

This paper discusses an Android application that allows users to search for information on books more intuitively using several methods the main one being the use of optical character recognition (OCR) to read the title of a book from its cover. The application uses Tesseract OCR engine to read the text and OpenCV image-processing library to process the image to make it more suitable for OCR. This paper describes the design decisions in the process of development, the final result and the issues identified during the development of the application.