How do I Take a picture, Scan it, then Populate EditText?

Question

I know a few apps do this but i have no idea where to start looking for examples or tutorials.

As an example, think of a check. You want to take a picture, have the app scan the check and then input the data into various EditText boxes for the user to look over and approve before sending.

TurboTax does this currently with your W2 on Android. Any help, or pointing in the right direction would be helpful.

Where should i be learning how to do this?

Answer 1

You might consider commercial software libraries, like that from A2iA Corporation (http://www.a2ia.com/en/a2ia-checkreader-0), or the open source Tesseract library (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/) for basic OCR operations.

Assuming you want to read the MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) characters at the bottom of the check, A2iA is a good start, as I'm unsure if Tesseract will work well with the E13B font used for this.