Using Microsoft OCR APIs in Windows 8.1 Store Apps

Step 4

Once you have completed Step 3 it is time to add some code to the app.

The XAML

The code is given below.

Here I’ve named the image “imageToBeRead” and the textblock “textRead”.

C#

After adding the using statements declare some global variables for the page just before the page constructor.

Be sure when you initialize the ocrEngine that you add the languages that you want to read from the image.

On the Click event of the LoadImage button add the following code.

In the preceding method I made a filepicker using which the user can select a file from their computer. The picked file is passed as a parameter to another method called loadImage.

The definition of loadImage is given below.

This method simply adds the selected image to the app.

The OCR processing occurs in the ReadImage button Click event as in the following:

In the preceding method you can see that I’ve made a OcrResult to hold the output that will come from the RecognizeAsync() method of the OcrEngine. The RecognizeAsync() method takes 3 arguments, the image height, the image width and the array of the pixel buffers of the image.

Then in the next step, there is a foreach loop that goes through every line of the result and another foreach loop is nested that goes through the each word that is in the line.

Now we simply add the text of the word in a string.

And then finally show the string using the textblock.

The output is in the images below:







Note: There is a small bug in the OCR API. It’s when you try to build the project with the AnyCPU configuration it will not succeed. You will need to change the build configuration to any of x64, x86 or ARM. It supports all of the CPUs but individually. I hope that in the next update Microsoft will fix this bug.