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Tesseract OCR Lotto Checker

Abstract

The Lotto Checking application uses the tesseract OCR library. A lotto ticket is scanned or photographed then imported into the application. The program then OCR's the ticket and looks for the game number and entry lines. The program then retrieves the results from the lotto site and compares the results. At the moment the program only supports Australian lotto. This program used used as a test bed to evaluate the capabilities of the tesseract OCR library. Tesseract works on Linux, Windows (with VC++ Express or CygWin) and Mac OSX.

System overview

Lotto Checker Screenshot

Below is a set of steps to check a lotto ticket. Prior to running the application the tesseract OCR library has been trained to recognise the font used for the lotto ticket

Scan a lotto ticket. The function is not currently built into the program. Its improtant to get a clean, aligned, image for successful OCR.
Open the scan in the application
Select "Process" to evaluate the ticket. This will perform an OCR pass, and if successful the results will be checked against a lotto format template
If the results match the template i.e. the scan looks like a lotto ticket. The game number and entries will be extracted.
The program will make a web POST to lotto site and match against the results
Winning numbers are marked, and a check is made for a division prize is more than 2 numbers are matched on a line

This project is currenly in development. Drop me an email if you are interested in testing the application.