Tools for Data Capturing from Scanned Images

What are best tools available for Data Capturing from Scanned Images? Doesn't matter they are free or paid. They should be able to convert scanned images to data (text, image, tables etc.). Most importantly they should have API to integrate with .NET 2.0 for automation.

Edit: The input data will generally be Text, Images, Tables places in the image. These images will basically be scanned pages from Catalogs containing data.

From stackoverflow

• You mean OCR (Optical Character Recognition)?

• Here are some example products:

  Aspire

  Ocrtools

  All these SourceForge .NET OCR's

• I recommend that you take a look into ReadIris Pro, which claims to have Automated Document Processing. There's a good chance that it has some form of API, although I have not actually verified that.

  I do know that it is happy with text, tables, and handprinting (handwriting in all caps), and as an added bonus can recognise barcodes.

  It does cost, though, but it not prohibitively expensive.

• ABBYY FineReader OCR API conforms to COM and can be used in C/C++, Visual Basic, .Net, Delphi, etc.

• You can use the people in Amazon's Mechanical Turk, you can program the people to do whatever you want, you can look at their API documentation for more info.

• AForge has alot of useful machine vision stuff.