The Increase in Demand for Mobile Phone

The increase in demand for mobile phone, leading to mobile phone being a vital part of our everyday activities. Hence enhancing communication between people from divers’ parts of the world.

According to Paula Vicente, Elizabeth Rics and Maria Santos of ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute, during a mobile phone survey on the 18th July, 2008, the increase in mobile phone penetration is stimulating a trend towards the use of mobile phones to supplement. For the first time ever there are more gadgets in the world than there are people, including a growing number that only communicate with other machines, according to data from digital analysts at GSMA Intelligence.

The number of active mobile devices and human beings crossed over somewhere around the 7.19 billion mark. As of today, GSMA’s real-time tracker puts the number of mobile devices at 7.22 billion whilst the US Census Bureau says the number of people is still somewhere between 7.19 and 7.2 billion. Gadgets like tablets, smartphones and not-so-smart phones are multiplying five times faster than we are, with our population growing at a rate of about two people per second, or 1.2% annually.

“No other technology has impacted us like the mobile phone. It’s the fastest growing manmade phenomenon ever -- from zero to 7.2 billion in three decades”, said Kevin Kimberlin, Chairman of Spencer Trask & Co. Smartphones are suitable and valid in every way for human use, but using of smartphone technologies to their potential requires some key functionalities like making phone calls, browsing the web, sending sms and media privileged functionalities and to be able to use most of the above functionalities, one is required to have credit or airtime on his or her mobile phone, making airtime or credit recharge a vital part of the mobile phone. Airtime or credit recharge as agreed to by a lot of people, especially grownups is frustrating and stressful sometimes as there can be some challenges such as network problems, leaving some of the pin code out, etc.

An android based mobile credit or airtime application to aid android phone users in a simple and effective recharge technique would go far to eradicate most of the challenges people face when recharging their mobile phone with credit or airtime. The application would make use of OCR technology to function. OCR has gained a higher level of popularity from computer scientists and lovers of I.T as well as the general public over the years since its invention in 1914 by Emmanuel Goldberg, due to its applicable nature in various fields of study. Until a few decades ago, research in the field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was limited to document images acquired with flatbed desktop scanners. The usability of such systems is limited as they are not portable because of large size of the scanners and the need of a computing system. Moreover, the shot speed of a scanner is slower than that of a digital camera. But now, with the advancement of processing speed and high internal memory of hand -held mobile devices such as high- end cell -phones, Personal Digital assistants (PDA), smart phones, iPhones, iPods, etc. has given a new direction to OCRs. An app called “Google Translate” has been launched for android phones which is one of the best app based on OCR.

OCR is a simple machine with different parts that works according to the programming. At first, a typical OCR consists of an optical scanner that scans the analog document .Then each symbol and character is extracted through a location segmentation process. The next stage is of preprocessing of scanned image. After that in the next stage i.e. feature extraction, the characters are further extracted according to the required dimensions. At the end in the last stage of recognition post processing, the characters are reconstructed with reduced noise according to the original text.