Robust OCR for iPhone from ABBYY

ABBYY has released an optical character recognition (OCR) and document conversion application engineered for Apple iOS. ABBYY explains FineReader Touch for iPhone allows users to photograph paper documents with the device’s camera, quickly upload images to the ABBYY cloud OCR service for recognition and conversion and then save or share the output files in popular editable and searchable formats. FineReader Touch is said to require few resources on a mobile device yet ensures superior accuracy of document conversion by leveraging the full capacity of cloud-based OCR.

ABBYY says its new app can accurately reproduce important documents in popular formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel, searchable PDF (PDF/A), RTF, TXT and ODT, rather than just photograph them. Images of documents can be either captured with the iPhone camera or uploaded directly from the device’s photo album. When sent to the online OCR service, separate pages of a document can be combined together into one consistent output file.

Through integration with the ABBYY cloud-based OCR service, the mobile application delivers the same high-quality results of text recognition as the full desktop version of ABBYY FineReader. The product supports text recognition in 42 languages as well as multilingual documents.