Tesseract OCR w/ iOS & Swift returns error or gibberish - ios

Question

I used this tutorial to get Tesseract OCR working with Swift: http://www.piterwilson.com/blog/2014/10/18/minimal-tesseact-ocr-setup-in-swift/
It works fine if I upload the demo image and call
tesseract.image = UIImage(named: "image_sample.jpg");
But if I use my camera code and take a picture of that same image and call
tesseract.image = self.image.blackAndWhite();
the result is either gibberish like
s I 5E251 :Ec
‘-. —7.//:E*髧
a g :_{:7 IC‘
J 7 iii—1553‘
: fizzle —‘;-—:
; ~:~./: -:-‘-
‘- :~£:': _-'~‘:
: 37%; §:‘—_
: ::::E 7,;.
1f:,:~ ——,
Or it returns a BAD_EXC_ACCESS error. I haven't been able to reproduce the reasoning behind why it gives the error or the gibberish. This is the code of my camera capture (photo taken()) and the processing step (nextStepTapped()):
#IBAction func photoTaken(sender: UIButton) {
var videoConnection = stillImageOutput.connectionWithMediaType(AVMediaTypeVideo)
if videoConnection != nil {
// Show next step button
self.view.bringSubviewToFront(self.nextStep)
self.nextStep.hidden = false
// Secure image
stillImageOutput.captureStillImageAsynchronouslyFromConnection(videoConnection) {
(imageDataSampleBuffer, error) -> Void in
var imageData = AVCaptureStillImageOutput.jpegStillImageNSDataRepresentation(imageDataSampleBuffer)
self.image = UIImage(data: imageData)
//var dataProvider = CGDataProviderCreateWithCFData(imageData)
//var cgImageRef = CGImageCreateWithJPEGDataProvider(dataProvider, nil, true, kCGRenderingIntentDefault)
//self.image = UIImage(CGImage: cgImageRef, scale: 1.0, orientation: UIImageOrientation.Right)
}
// Freeze camera preview
captureSession.stopRunning()
}
}
#IBAction func nextStepTapped(sender: UIButton) {
// Save to camera roll & proceeed
//UIImageWriteToSavedPhotosAlbum(self.image.blackAndWhite(), nil, nil, nil)
//UIImageWriteToSavedPhotosAlbum(self.image, nil, nil, nil)
// OCR
var tesseract:Tesseract = Tesseract();
tesseract.language = "eng";
tesseract.delegate = self;
tesseract.image = self.image.blackAndWhite();
tesseract.recognize();
NSLog("%#", tesseract.recognizedText);
}
The image saves to the Camera Roll and is completely legible if I uncomment the commented lines. Not sure why it won't work. It has no problem reading the text on the image if it's uploaded directly into Xcode as a supporting file, but if I take a picture of the exact same image on my screen then it can't read it.

Answer 1

Stumbled upon this tutorial: http://www.raywenderlich.com/93276/implementing-tesseract-ocr-ios
It happened to mention scaling the image. They chose the max dimension as 640. I was taking my pictures as 640x480, so I figured I didn't need to scale them, but I think this code essentially redraws the image. For some reason now my photos OCR fairly well. I still need to work on image processing for smaller text, but it works perfectly for large text. Run my image through this scaling function and I'm good to go.
func scaleImage(image: UIImage, maxDimension: CGFloat) -> UIImage {
var scaledSize = CGSize(width: maxDimension, height: maxDimension)
var scaleFactor: CGFloat
if image.size.width > image.size.height {
scaleFactor = image.size.height / image.size.width
scaledSize.width = maxDimension
scaledSize.height = scaledSize.width * scaleFactor
} else {
scaleFactor = image.size.width / image.size.height
scaledSize.height = maxDimension
scaledSize.width = scaledSize.height * scaleFactor
}
UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(scaledSize)
image.drawInRect(CGRectMake(0, 0, scaledSize.width, scaledSize.height))
let scaledImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext()
UIGraphicsEndImageContext()
return scaledImage
}