Camera Phone Reviews

'Hitachi Ltd. has created OCR (optical character recognition) software for camera phones that could open up a new range of services.

OCR programs that can read Japanese characters and convert them into text usually require tens of megabytes of memory. But Hitachi has developed an algorithm that requires less than 1MB, which is compact enough to run on a cell phone.

The software analyzes the shapes of the characters and the relative positions of words, converting the text images captured by the phone's camera into text data that can be transmitted over the Internet.

This setup can be used for services that provide users with additional information when they use their camera phones to photograph interesting articles in a magazine or catalog.'

Read more at Hitachi Develops Camera Phone Software That Reads Japanese