Just poked around CPAN to find a module for a simple OCR (optical character recognition) task. I stumbled across OCR::PerfectCR, written by fellow perlmonk theorbtwo.

I realized that this module would only solve easy tasks, so I gave it a simple image containing a single character. The documentation is a bit sketchy (what's the format of a character map?), so I dumped out the result with Data::Dumper: 

use OCR::PerfectCR;
use GD;
use Data::Dumper;

my($file) = @ARGV;
die "No file" unless defined $file;

my $recognizer = OCR::PerfectCR->new;
$recognizer->load_charmap_file("charmap");
my $image = GD::Image->new($file) or die;
my(@out) = $recognizer->recognize($image);
print Dumper(\@out);

[download]
which printed the following: 
  'width' => 18,
  'str' => "\x{fffd}",
  'endcol' => 18, 
  'startcol' => 0,
  'color' => '163',
  'bgrgb' => [
    148,
    202,
    212 
  ],  
  'chrwidth' => '18',
  'md5' => '9454596172a32923111c25373a801472',
  'prespace' => 0

[download]
Hmm. So where's the result? Is it really "\x{fffd}"? Alternatively, can anyone recommend a solution that works?

As previously discussed, there's issues with getting proper OCR, but if you know of anything that actually works, please let me know.

In reply to Does OCR::PerfectCR work at all? by saintmike

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