OCR on Windows Phone 8 WP8 - windows-phone-8

Question

I'm new to the world of programming, and am trying to develop an app that uses OCR.
I want the app to convert a singular receipt into text (nothing too complex).
However my problem is that i'm finding a lack of information for OCR on WP8, and how to implement it.
I would have though that it's a built in function of WP and that information would be easily accessible as to how to implement it.
Anyone know where I could look, or a simple example snippet of code I could use?
Not wanting a subscription based service.

Answer 1

Microsoft recently released the OCR Library for Windows Runtime. Jerry Nixon has posted a video guiding you though it, and there is also an msdn article.
Jerry Nixon's Blog
MSDN

Answer 2

You can try using the same OCR service that the Bing Lens uses. If you haven't tried it: open camera, change lens to bing lens and try it out
The service endpoint is http://ocrrest.bingvision.net/V1. It also gives you information about the location of the detected text with their bounding boxes
Probably some fiddler analysis will help you to send your image in a similar fashion.
I have a little snippet below which expects the image as byte array
public static readonly string ocrServiceUrl = "http://ocrrest.bingvision.net/V1"; // was: "platform.bing.com/ocr/V1";
public static readonly string ocrLanguage = "en";
public static async Task<JsonObject> MakeOcrJSON(byte[] image)
{
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(string.Format("{0}/Recognize/{1}", ocrServiceUrl, ocrLanguage));
request.Method = "POST";
using (Stream requestStream = await request.GetRequestStreamAsync())
{
requestStream.Write(image, 0, image.Length);
}
try
{
using (HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse) (await request.GetResponseAsync()))
{
using (var responseStream = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
{
var json = JsonObject.Parse(responseStream.ReadToEnd());
return json;
}
}
}
catch (WebException we)
{
using (Stream responseStream = we.Response.GetResponseStream())
{
DataContractJsonSerializer serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(OcrResponse));
OcrResponse ocrResponse = (OcrResponse)serializer.ReadObject(responseStream);
string ErrorMessage = "Unknown Error";
if (ocrResponse.OcrFault.HasValue)
{
ErrorMessage = string.Format(
"HTTP status code: {0} Message: {1}",
ocrResponse.OcrFault.Value.HttpStatusCode,
ocrResponse.OcrFault.Value.Message);
}
throw new Exception(ErrorMessage);
}
}
}