title: Open Source way to real-time image processing OCR application?
body: <p>I have an application in mind that I want to produce.  We have wall-mounted schedule boards that are divided into small rectangles using black lines on a white background.  Magnetic name tags are placed into a particular partition to indicate this person is to work in that cell.  This system works very well for communication among people, but I would like an automatic way of saving this schedule information into a database automatically.</p>
  
  <p>I am envisioning a system where a camera is set in a fix position focusing on the schedule board.  Periodically the camera will take a picture of the board.  I want to write some code to decipher which name tags are in which area.  This would require some OCR or symbol recognition.  There are big numbers on each name tag that I will use to identify the person whose name tag it is.  </p>
  
  <p>I naturally go to Python when tackling a new programming problem.  I found this post -> <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1603688/python-image-recognition">python image recognition</a> which looks like a good place to start (with PIL and numpy).</p>
  
  <p>Do you know a good way to do this? </p>
  
  <p>Update:  I have tried SimpleCV and it seems good for now.</p>