Camera based mixed-lingual card reader for mobile device

With the availability of high-resolution cameras and increased computation power, it becomes possible to implement OCR applications such as business card reader in the mobile device. In this paper we introduced the design and implementation of a mixed-lingual business card reader based on built-in camera. It has the capability to recognize business cards with Chinese or English characters. In order to deal with the challenge of limited resource in mobile device, we proposed some new methods to reduce the resource requirement of the image processing and the Chinese OCR engine. Our experiment gives satisfactory result.