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Show HN: Convert scanned documents into searchable PDFs
- mwcampbell 11y agoIs this based on an open-source OCR engine, a proprietary engine running on your own server(s), or a proprietary engine you're accessing as a service?
- raphman_ 11y agoGiven that the OCR'ed PDFs use the "GlyphLessFont" font, it seems that tesseract [1] is used. [1] https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
- cfcef 11y agoI hope not. Tesseract delivers bad results on high quality scans, far below the same OCR quality achieved by services like Google Books. What the OCR market needs is someone who will bring that level of OCR quality - or better - to the masses (perhaps some deep learning grad student with time to kill?), not yet another wrapper around Tesseract. We have those already!
- mynewtb 11y agoI have had great result using tesseract via gimagereader. Are you sure your configuration is good?
- random778 11y agoPossible to upload an example image + result?
- jiaweihli 11y agoHave you looked into ocropy[0]? Here's a nice intro[1] that later talks about how it achieves higher accuracy using an LSTM model[2]. [0] https://github.com/tmbdev/ocropy https://github.com/tmbdev/ocropy [1] http://www.danvk.org/2015/01/09/extracting-text-from-an-image-using-ocropus.html http://www.danvk.org/2015/01/09/extracting-text-from-an-imag... [2] http://www.danvk.org/2015/01/11/training-an-ocropus-ocr-model.html http://www.danvk.org/2015/01/11/training-an-ocropus-ocr-mode...
- acdha 11y agoIs the problem really Tesseract or the fact that it doesn't have a robust front-end performing segmentation, de-skewing, better binarization, etc? I've heard that Google Books is actually using the Tesseract engine but has seen better results in part from better training but mostly from a more advanced system breaking each page into the blocks of text which are actually OCRed.
- jes 11y agoI would use this service, if I had scanned PDFs where I didn't care about confidentiality. As it stands, though, uploading them to an unknown web resource seems risky. Thoughts?
- bmh_ca 11y agoWhile interesting, and looks to be a needed services, the page leaves many questions, such as: What's the privacy model? While the PDFs are deleted, what happens to the searchable content? Is it also deleted? What's the revenue model? How can we be sure it'll be around in a few months? Is there an AJAX interface? Is the quality or performance better than running Tesseract on a server?
- Cheyana 11y agoAlso relevant, how do we know they're not injecting a pdf exploit into the final document? There is no real company information to hold anyone accountable. There could be a dozen websites like this for people to use for "free" that will inject malicious script which most antivirus apps won't detect. Not saying it's not useful, and awesome if legit but there should be more accountability. This is almost the internet equivalent of a stranger in a car waving free candy at a child walking down the street. My workplace was hit yet again today with a Cryptolocker variant (second time this month) which required us to restore thousands of files from backup. All from clicking on a link in an email.
- zurbi 11y agoVery clean UI. But how can one judge the OCR quality of this service? The service presents me a converted PDF, but how good was the conversion? Is this better than https://ocr.space https://ocr.space ? For my private documents I would always use offline OCR software like http://blog.a9t9.com/p/free-ocr-software.html http://blog.a9t9.com/p/free-ocr-software.html
- callesgg 11y agoI just use the OCR function built in to Adobe Acrobat. Don't know it the OCR function is available in the reader version.
- petemc_ 11y agoSame here, have been using acrobat x for this purpose for years, very impressed how good the OCR is.
- Omnipresent 11y agoIs this based on tesseract?
- rm_-rf_slash 11y agoI've had this idea for a while, but as an iPhone app. The case where I could have used it the most was when I would be studying and looking through textbooks for a particular word or phrase. It would be so convenient to just take a picture, input the text to look for, and see a highlight. If this were a mobile app and I were still in college, I would most certainly buy it.
- patrickfl 11y agoBeen hanging here in Firefox now for about 5-10 minutes its a receipt for my insurance (no private info) about 2 pages in length. Either way, super cool idea. My Dad will be stoked about this as he's been OCR'ing his way into oblivion for the past few years.
- panglott 11y agoIs this Web site accessible (say, via screen-reader)? Scanned PDFs can be a huge problem for people who are visually impaired.
- hondo77 11y agoI use PDFScanner on my Mac. Works great at scanning time or post-scanning. No, it's not free but it's worth it. Pay the $15, ya cheap bastiches! :-) BTW, how is this news?
- theGimp 11y agoHN is not just for news. It's for whatever you deem worthy of sharing. It comes down to how many people agree it's interesting by upvoting :)