OCR few known form formats. Where to start?

Question

I have photos/scans of documents in few 10s of known formats. Every document contains some known attributes (date/time, names, and list of items).

Can you please suggest which apps/libs to start with (in Objective)C/C++)? Can OpenCV do that? What about OCR? Layout recognition for OCR?

Thanks!

P.S. Please suggest how to rephrase my post

P.P.S. I have found some promising tool (with examples for iOS): https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ and https://github.com/robmathews/OCR-iOS-Example

Answer 1

To detect where the text is on the page I would recommend using OpenCV to do that, then send the regions of text to tesseract.

Find text:

Erode Image

Find Contours

Get bounding boxes of contours

Those bounding boxes should contain text or logo/picture.