Automatic Contact Importer from Business Cards for Android

This report describes the development of a standalone business card reader for Android smartphones. We use image processing techniques to preprocess the card’s image, which might have been taken from a difficult perspective, unfavorable lighting conditions, or partial occlusions. The text in the preprocessed image is then extracted using optical character recognition (OCR) and parsed to isolate the name, phone number, and email address of the contact to be automatically imported in the user’s address book. The app comprises of a single Java class linked with Tesseract and OpenCV libraries. The preprocessing is performed in C++ and called using Java Native Interface (JNI) provided by Android. The system was tested with business cards of varying appearances in a wide range of backgrounds and occlusions by the user holding it in his/her hand. Our standalone Android app performs well in these test scenarios.