identifying text chars in an image

[hh]

After a second read I think it will be hard to find a service to do that
for you. And this is not doable using tesseract or similar from LiveCode:

AFAIK, no "ordinary" OCR software is able to detect and read horizontal
*and* vertical text and distinguish clearly between the board's "Score
text" and the "Scrabble letters". You (or your service) would have to
write an own "learning routine" for that.

E.g. the algorithm described here:
http://rasdasd.com/projects/Scrabble_Detector/Scrabble_Paper.pdf

There are also approaches for own specialized boards like here
https://github.com/eladj/ScrabbleOCR
You could try to use the java from there via LC Builder's FFI.

> Phil D. wrote:
> I want to [programmatically] take a picture of a Scrabble board and then 
> take from that image the characters displayed in it, and maintain the 
> organization of the text. In other words, I want to convert the text 
> displayed in the image to text strings.
> 
> Any ideas where I should start?
> 
> I would love to be able to do it in my app. However I'm not completely 
> against uploading the image to a service that would do it for me; I am 
> only mostly against it.