US Patent 8965117 Image pre-processing for reducing consumption of resources

Embodiments of the subject technology provide methods and systems of image pre-processing for improving the accuracy of optical character recognition (OCR) and reducing the power consumption on a given computing device (e.g., mobile computing device). The subject technology, in some examples, classifies an image received from a camera of a mobile computing device into one or more classes: 1) normal background, 2) textured background, 3) image with text, 4) image with barcode, 5) image with QR code, and/or 6) image with clutter or “garbage.” Based on the classes associated with the image, the subject technology may forgo certain image processing operations, when the image is not associated with a particular class, in order to save resources (e.g., CPU cycles, battery power, memory usage, etc.) on the mobile computing device.