Unity3D - OCR Number Recognition
<p>Our initial use case called for writing an application in Unity3D (write solely in C# and deploy to both iOS and Android simultaneously) that allowed a mobile phone user to hold their camera up to the title of a magazine article, use OCR to read the title, and then we would process that title on the backend to get related stories. <a href="http://www.vuforia.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Vuforia</a> was far and away the best for this use case because of its fast native character recognition.</p>

<p>After the initial application was demoed a bit, more potential uses came up. Any use case that needed solely A-z characters recognized was easy in Vuforia, but the second it called for number recognition we had to look elsewhere because Vuforia does not support number recognition (now or anywhere in the near future).</p>

<p>Attempted Workarounds:</p>

<ol>
<li><a href="https://cloud.google.com/vision/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Google Cloud Vision</a> - works great, but not native and camera images are sometime quite large, so not nearly as fast as we require. Even thought about using the <a href="https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21088" rel="nofollow noreferrer">OpenCV</a> Unity asset to identify the numbers and then send multiple much smaller API calls, but still not native and one extra step.</li>
<li>Following instructions from <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10947399/how-to-implement-and-do-ocr-in-a-c-sharp-project#answer-27385157">SO</a> to use a .Net wrapper for Tesseract - would probably work great, but after building and trying to bring the external dlls into Unity I receive this error <code>.Net Assembly Not Found</code> (most likely an issue with the version of .Net the dlls were compiled in).</li>
<li>Install Tesseract from source on a server and then create our own API - honestly unclear why we tried this when Google's works so well and is actively maintained.</li>
</ol>

<p>Has anyone run into this same problem in Unity and ultimately found a good solution?</p>