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.

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.