Building the Tesseract NDK library for Android

My project for my Android Components graduate class at FAU (COT6930) was a component to allow programmers better access to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) package Tesseract maintained by Google.

The issue with this library, is that it is written in C and C++. It contains not only the OCR library, but also the Leptonica Image Processing Library.

Available Resources

We have the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) that offers the means of utilizing code written in C and or C++ in our Android programming. However the process of compiling and preparing those libraries is very complex, lengthy and error prone. Below I describe the process; however after my component will allow users to have a more direct access to the OCR libraries on  their own Android development.

We have available the excellent work of Robert Theis with his tess-two project. Tess-two uses the Tesseract project and adds the Android Java Native Interface (JNI) to allow compilation for the Android platform, complete in an Eclipse project.