Optical Character Recognition in VB??

[tedsmith]

Does anyone know of a simple OCR ActiveX control or routine that can be incorporated into my VB application. All I want to do is recognise if there are any sort of alpha numeric characters like a car number plate on a TV camera monitoring a garage doorway. That way I can tell if it is a vehicle or a person coming in through the entrance by detecting a number plate.
The chances of a person carring a placard with large letters is very slim!

 

[vb5prgrmr]

I know that there are several tools out there that do OCR for free but for their effectivness I do not know how well they operate, but for the price...

http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/v2/e...5296&xid=16588&DSP=&CUR=840&PGRP=0&CACHE_ID=0

This toolkit you can buy for a decent price. This is the professional edition of the imaging tools that have come with windows since 95, and it contains an OCR engine which does quite well.

 

[aklein]

I've done the kind of thing you're looking to do. It takes A LOT more than an ActiveX component. In fact it takes a lot more than VB if you want the plate recognized before the owner has to replace it with a new one.

I know that's not the kind of answer you're looking for but optical recognition makes automated video editing look like "Hello, World".

(OCR requires a very limited font set being passed theough a reader in a very fixed position. Scanning an entire video field makes the job MUCH more difficult.)

 

[tedsmith]

thanks