NAME

Image::Ocrad - Call ocrad, the GNU Optical Character Recognition utility

SYNOPSIS

use Image::Ocrad;
@characters = ocrad('some.pbm');

ABSTRACT

Use GNU ocrad to extract text from a PBM image file.  This module invokes
ocrad with default options.

DESCRIPTION

What it does

Call's ocrad with the path to a PBM file supplied by the caller, and returns
a list of characters extracted from the file.

Functionality not supported

* inversion of image colors prior to processing
* image transformations (reflection, rotation, etc)
* recognition of alternative character sets (default is ascii)
* extraction of a subset of recognized text

These features are possible by calling ocrad with extra options. Perhaps I'll add these features later if they're requested or I need them.

EXPORT

ocrad()

This function accepts a path to a PBM file as input, returns a list of recognized ascii characters as output.

SEE ALSO

http://www.gnu.org/software/ocrad/ocrad.html

TODO

* XS code to link to an ocrad shared object rather than calling a system binary.
This requires modifcation of the ocrad build, as it doesn't provide a shared
object option in the configure/make process
* Allow the ocrad binary to be installed in other than /usr/bin
* Better exceptions.  Check that files exist or throw error, etc.

AUTHOR

Allen Day, <allenday@ucla.edu>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2005 by Allen Day

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.