Turn Your N95 to Scanner and OCR

A mobile phone plus a great digital camera can do amazing things. How about use your N95’s 5MP camera as scanner and OCR device. Well, you can do that without install any software.

Try ScanR, a online mobile OCR services for camera phones. I tried and found it’s OK but not without road blocks.

First, you need sign up from ScanR.com, simple and easy. Then it will ask you send a document (a photo of document taken by your cell phone) to doc(at)scanr.com to get your phone registered, by typing in the returned code back to your phone via SMS.

You will quickly realize, very likely by a SMS from ScanR , that you need send them the  photo in at lease 1024×768 resolution, meaning a 2MP size. Problem is that, by default, the MMS of most of phone will reduce the photo size to much less than that. Besides, the there is this 300K limitation for MMS, at least on N95.

So, there are two setting to deal with.

One, to configure the MMS to disable the auto size reduction. Just go Menu -> Message -> Options -> Settings -> Multimedia Message to change it, shown as the screenshot.

Two, change the phone camera setting to take the photo in 2MP, instead of 5MP on N95. Go Camera -> Options to do that.

Now, all you need to do is to take picture of a document, whiteboard or business card and send the picture to either doc(at)scanr.com, wb(at)scanr.com or bc(at)scanr.com. The text of the photo will be extracted, a OCR function at scanR.

If you do need use the scanner function and don’t want to change the settings of your phone, you can install ScanR software to your phone. That will give you added convince to your scanning works.

I haven’t try the software yet. It’s the next thing on my N95 adventure list.