The mobile phone as a platform for assisting the independent living ...

Fig. 13: Performing OCR on a photograph of a medication boxOptical Character Recognition is achieved with the help of Microsoft Office DocumentImaging (MODI) object model. MODI is a Microsoft Office application that supportsediting documents scanned by Microsoft Office Document Scanning. It was firstintroduced in Microsoft Office XP and is included in later Office versions includingOffice 2003 and Office 2007. One of the MODI features is an OCR engine that it allowsusers to produce editable text from scanned documents, interpreting pixel-based imagesto layout and text elements.7.4 Optimizing the resultsWe tested our application with a number of photographs captured by a ΗTC P3650smart phone. The results derived from our experiments were discouraging, so we didseveral efforts to optimize the performance of our application.A well-known method that can be used to increase the image quality and thus, the OCRresults, is performing image processing techniques to the photographs. We used AdobePhotoshop CS2 to apply image processing functions to photographs of medication boxesin order to achieve a better performance of the OCR. The image processing techniquesthat we performed are:• Contrast adjustment• Level adjustment• Grayscale• Sharpness filter• Threshold adjustment43