Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications (MoIT) is in the process of developing a state-of-the-art Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Engine which can be used to develop applications, official sources revealed on Sunday.
MoIT hopes that the success of this project – Smart Intelligence, an OCR Engine for Android Smartphone – would not only result in research, experience and related advantages for developers in Pakistan but also stimulate smart phones software development.
The project is divided into two different phases – the first phase will tackle character recognition problem for constrained or structured document images and in the next phase character recognition problem for unconstrained or unstructured document images will be addressed.
National ICT Research and Development Fund, a department of MoIT is working on the project in collaboration with Abasyn University, Islamabad.
According to ICT Fund, the project, costing Rs 13.33 million is in closure process and would provide a great opportunity to students/researchers of local universities to work on the top research problems in the field.
The open source nature of the project would encourage collaboration from developers all over the world.
While mobile computing is an exciting and fascinating area of research, application development on the smart phones is comparatively a newer field.
Although the techniques like J2ME (Java2 Micro Edition) have existed for quite a few years but as the name indicates they had micro set of features.
Only after the availability of iPhone and Android enabled smart phones, the world saw the availability of the powerful Application Programming Interface (API) for smart phone applications development.
The project is a big step as future of smart phones market depends heavily on the availability of smarter and innovative applications.
