ABBYY Europe, which provides document recognition, data capture and language software, has announced the availability of its Mobile OCR Engine 4.0, a new version of the award-winning software development kit (SDK) for creating small-footprint optical character recognition (OCR) applications. The key enhancement is support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean OCR developed by ABBYY. The software now covers 62 European and Asian recognition languages, and a wide variety of operating systems, including Symbian, iPhone, Mac OS, Android, Linux, Mobile Linux (Moblin), Windows, and Windows Mobile.

The new version of the SDK also has enhancements to the recognition processes, which help ensure greater accuracy and give developers working with the SDK more control over the recognition results. New features include additional image pre-processing, which automatically detects the orientation of a page of text to be recognised (if it is sideways or upside down); and a confidence level indicator, which shows the level of certainty for recognised text, allowing developers to set flexible criteria for the implementation of proofreading and verification functions.

“Mobile often means global. Successful mobile products, both hardware and software, become popular worldwide very quickly,” says Katya Solntseva, ABBYY’s director of mobile products department. “To enter new local markets or expand their offering with versions supporting new platforms and devices, developers will need a versatile and flexible technology. The ABBYY SDK is a truly multilingual and multi-platform toolkit providing not only quality OCR, but the possibility for easy growth and expansion using the same, proven technology from the same provider.”

There’s more information about the SDK here.