ITERATIVE PROCESS FOR OPTIMIZING OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION

The disclosed embodiments relate to a system and method for calibrating optical character recognition (OCR) processes for an image captured through a mobile computing device. During operation, the system adjusts the OCR process through pre-recognition functions, OCR functions and/or post-recognition functions with multiple sets of parameter settings. With each of these sets, the system scores the OCR process output against an image with known text. Once the sets are scored, the system sorts the sets of parameters, removes some sets, then mixes and mutates the remaining sets in a process akin to evolutionary biology. By repeating this procedure, the system produces a set of parameter settings that can be used to calibrate OCR processing.