Paper form recognition

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It's a pretty difficult task for a newbie and probably for experienced developer too. For text, I would suggest you to look into OCR (Optical Character Recognition). And maybe if you could provide a sample form, we would be able to suggest something further. One thing for sure if you want to recognize text take a look into OCR, here is a basic tutorial Be aware he is using old OpenCV version, but for understanding it's a good article.

For check boxes, if a user draws cross in it, you can use template matching.

Maybe it's even easier to find already made solution to scan documents and convert them to digital file. If you're up for challenge I encourage trying to accomplish this task by yourself

Here is an example on how you can read sudoku puzzle on iPhone: http://sudokugrab.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-does-it-all-work.html. This task is a bit simpler than yours, but the post highlights some important aspects of such applications. I would recommend to use a scanner instead of camera for getting forms in digital format, that will allow you to skip the distortion compensation step.

And I agree with @XCoder that it is a tough task, and you should provide a sample filled form.

You can also check the following links:

1. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9413216/simple-digit-recognition-ocr-in-opencv-python
2. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7542194/how-to-use-opencv-for-document-recognition-with-ocr