ABBYY Real-Time Recognition SDK (RTR SDK) is a software development kit which provides a capability to recognize text directly on the smartphone camera preview screen.

About this release

Purpose

Purposes of the release:

• Support new IDs
• Protection update

Build information

Part Number: 1305/25
Build Number: 1.0.9.52

Additional information

• ABBYY Technology Portal: https://abbyy.technology/en:products:rtrsdk:start
• Forum: http://forum.ocrsdk.com/tags/rtr/
• Knowledgebase: http://knowledgebase.ocrsdk.com/?searchText=&ProductId=2008

History of releases

Releases of the current product version in descending order (only releases of the same Part# type).

Product specification

Hardware and software requirements

Supported operating systems

• Android 4.4 and later for ARMv7 processors and arm64-v8a processors
• iOS 8.x and later

Processor requirements

• A multi-core processor (augmented reality scenarios will require 4 cores or more)
• Advanced SIMD (NEON)

Memory requirements (RAM)

Library operation in text capture scenario takes up:

• for text in alphabetic languages - 40 MB RAM
• for text in CJK languages - 70 MB RAM

Library operation in data capture scenario takes up to 105 MB RAM for iOS and 170 MB RAM for Android

Memory requirements (ROM)

• Library — 3 to 19 MB RAM
• Resources for OCR — 1.6 to 18.4 MB ROM, depending on the recognition languages
• Optional resources for better OCR quality — 14.4 MB ROM, European languages only
• Resources for Data Capture scenarios:
  • bank card recognition – 1 MB ROM
  • MRZ recognition – 0.5 MB ROM
  • ID recognition – 0.5 to 16 MB ROM, depending on the documents to be recognized

Camera requirements

• Autofocus lens
• HD preview: generally recommended frame size is 720*1080, but it can vary depending on the scenario and processing speed

Supported languages, types, and formats

Supported OCR languages

62 recognition languages are available for OCR:

• 23 languages with dictionary support: Czech, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch (Belgian), Dutch (Netherlands), English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German (old and new spelling), Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian
• 35 additional languages with Latin, Cyrillic, or Greek characters: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Breton, Belarusian, Catalan, Chechen, Crimean Tatar, Croatian, Fijian, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Kabardian, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maori, Mixed, Moldavian, Mongol, Ossetic, Provencal, RhaetoRomanic, Romanian, Samoan, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Tagalog, Tatar, and Welsh
• 4 Asian complex script languages: Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese and Korean

Supported text types

• Common typographic type of text is supported (Normal)

Key features

Real-time OCR

ABBYY Real-Time Recognition SDK enables mobile developers to create mobile apps with capability to recognize text on video frames from smartphone’s camera.

In comparison with ordinary OCR technologies which work with photos RTR SDK doesn’t require snapping a photo, but offers the possibility to automatically “snap text”: recognizing video frames the engine automatically estimates whether the recognition result is stable enough and can be returned to user. Also recognition in real-time provides some additional advantages:

• provides better UX and helps to save user time for taking and retaking a photo;
• proposes additional advantages for some scenarios which require confidentiality of captured data (like ID capture), because RTR doesn’t require to save image in the memory storage

Recognition of text in real-world scenes

ABBYY Real-Time Recognition SDK enables localization and then recognition of text in real-world scenes, like:

Recognition methods can search for text of any color on any background. In comparison with ordinary mobile OCR technologies, which use ordinary document analysis, ABBYY Real-Time Recognition SDK demonstrates better performance and recognition accuracy on natural scenes (like signs, etc.) – the recognition results contain less noise. Thus RTR SDK better suits for computer vision applications like searching images by their textual content, assisting visually impaired, reading labels and street signs in map applications and applications for tourists.

Merging the recognition results

Video frames and even photos often contain glare, motion blur and other defects which lead to recognition errors. To increase recognition quality and to eliminate such random recognition errors RTR SDK uses so-called Frame Merging, i.e. special statistical mechanism which aggregates, estimates and combines recognition results from several video frames.

For some contexts merging recognition results from several video frames RTR achieves even better recognition accuracy than recognizing a photo of the same context.

Translation

Real-time translation

ABBYY Real-Time Recognition SDK enables mobile developers to create apps capable of translating text on video frames from smartphone’s camera on device without any Internet connection.

RTR SDK provides build-in translation dictionaries for word-by-word and phrase translation. The dictionaries contain words and some common phrases for the main European, Chinese and Japanese languages (please, see the full list of supported translation directions). Translation dictionaries optimized for work on mobile devices. Translation process requires few resources and takes a fraction of a second to complete.

Supported translation directions

• English - Russian; German; French; Spanish; Portuguese (Brazilian); Polish; Chinese (simplified); Japanese; Indonesian
• Russian; German; French; Spanish; Portuguese (Brazilian); Polish; Chinese (simplified); Japanese; Indonesian - English