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STAFF REPORT ISB: The government of Pakistan is executing a project to develop an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Engine for Android to stimulate smartphones software development.
The project called – Smart Intelligence – an OCR Engine for Android Smartphone – intends to develop a state-of-the-art OCR Engine which can be used by developers to produce their own applications.
The National ICT R and D Fund, an executing department of the Ministry is implementing the project in phases in collaboration with Abasyn University, Islamabad at a cost of Rs 13.33 million.
The project, expected to be completed by June next year, is being implemented by Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications (MoIT).
According to information, in the first phase the intent is to tackle the 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.
The project would also provide a great opportunity to the students and researchers to universities to work on top notch research problems in the field. Open source nature of the project would encourage collaboration from developers all over the world.
It is to be mentioned here that mobile computing is considered to be one of the most fascinating areas of research of the computing discipline these days.