ABBYY Demonstrates First Mobile Business Card OCR Sample Utility

Sample BCR utility leverages the powerful capabilities of the ABBYY Mobile OCR software development toolkit (SDK) bringing mobile data capture to smartphone devices.

ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies, today announced a sample Business Card Recognition (BCR) utility that leverages the powerful capabilities of the ABBYY Mobile OCR software development toolkit (SDK) bringing mobile data capture to smartphone devices. The BCR utility showcases the ability to capture business cards using the built-in digital camera, and extract contact information from the image directly to the telephone address book. ABBYY will demonstrate this BCR sample utility on smartphones based on Symbian, S60 or UIQ platforms at the CTIA Wireless conference held in Orlando, Florida March 27 - 29, 2007.

“According to industry analysts, approximately 123 million smartphone units are expected to be shipped worldwide this year, and these users will expect increasingly sophisticated capabilities on these devices,” said Dean Tang, president and CEO at ABBYY USA. “The sample BCR utility is a prime example of the ways developers can provide innovative OCR and business card reading functionality to smartphones and other mobile devices, and we are pleased to showcase the technology in action at CTIA.”

The ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK provides developers with straightforward tools to create business card reading applications for mobile devices that can automatically capture a broad array of information from business cards, including name, title, company name, email address, address, phone numbers, fax number and cell phone number. In addition, users may process images sent to the phone from another phone. The sample application supports recognition of business cards in nine languages: English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

The Mobile OCR SDK supports developers in integrating optical character recognition (OCR) and business card reading functions into mobile platforms and applications. The SDK offers a truly OS-independent technology to support integration into any mobile platform including the Brew, Linux, Symbian, and Windows Mobile operating systems. Designed with the needs of mobile solution providers in mind, the ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK combines powerful recognition functions with a small software footprint to minimize the use of hardware resources, and provide accurate real-time results.  Developers can readily embed OCR functionality into any mobile imaging device, including camera phones, digital cameras, PDAs, handheld scanners, and other camera-based hardware.

Detailed information on licensing models and pricing, as well as other technical information, about ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK are available from ABBYY USA.