This is primarily just curiosity, but are there any OCR implementations in pure Java? I'm curious how this would perform purely in Java, and OCR in general interests me, so I'd love to see how it's implemented in a language I thoroughly understand. Naturally, this would require that the implementation is open source, but I'm still interested in proprietary solutions, as I could at least check out the performance in that case.
I've seen a couple which can be used in Java (like Asprise) but it doesn't seem that these are pure Java implementations... are there any?
Just found this one (don't know it, not tested, check yourself)
As you only need this for curiosity you could look into the source of this applet.
It does OCR of handwritten characters with a neural network
There are a variety of OCR libraries out there. However, my experience is that the major commercial implementations, ABBYY, Omnipage, and ReadIris, far outdo the open-source or other minor implementations. These commercial libraries are not primarily designed to work with Java, though of course it is possible.
Of course, if your interest is to learn the code, the open-source implementations will do the trick.
We have tested a few OCR engines with Java like Tesseract,Asprise, Abbyy etc. In our analysis, Abbyy gave the best results.
I recommend trying the Java OCR project on sourceforge.net. I originally developed it, and I have a blog posting on it.
Since I put it up on sourceforge, its functionality been expanded and improved quite a bit through the great work of a volunteer researcher/developer.
Give it a try, and if you don't like it, you can always improve it!
If you are looking for a very extensible option or have a specific problem domain you could consider rolling your own using the Java Object Oriented Neural Engine. Another JOONE reference.
I used it successfully in a personal project to identify the letter from an image such as this, you can find all the source for the OCR component of my application on github, here.
Source: Stackoverflow.com
