I need a pre-built (i.e. already trained) OCR library that recognizes easy characters (standard fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, Courier, etc). Does Matlab have anything like that in one of its toolboxes? Or do I have to use an external program like Tesseract (and interface using system calls)?
I'm not familiar with an official MATLAB OCR toolbox. However, you can find all sorts of gems in the MATLAB File Exchange, like this OCR tool. It's pretty neat.