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Sorry to hijack, but what about the best OCR service? I'd much rather farm the OCR work out to another service than trying to do it myself.
by deedubaya 10y ago
Sorry to hijack, but what about the best OCR service? I'd much rather farm the OCR work out to another service than trying to do it myself.
- danso 10y agoI bought ABBYY FineReader for Mac for abut $99. I find it to be pretty amazing. My new scanner also came with it and I generally expect it to do a reasonable text translation of whatever I throw it, whether it be newsprint articles or crumpled receipts. If you need to do OCR that also preserves table structure -- which is what I bought FineReader for in the first place, I don't think there's any open source alternative, and FineReader does a very capable job. Here's an example of FineReader in action: OCRing the docs released by the FBI on Clinton's email system. I've also included the pdftotext output showing how FineReader's text conversion also attempts to preserve the physical layout of the text characters: https://github.com/dannguyen/clinton-hillary-email-fbi-investigation-docs https://github.com/dannguyen/clinton-hillary-email-fbi-inves...
- walterbell 10y agoThey also have a Linux CLI for servers, it seems to be licensed by annual page volume, https://www.abbyy.com/ocr-sdk-linux https://www.abbyy.com/ocr-sdk-linux & http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:pricing http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:pricing
- postila 10y agothank you, I'll check it out. Know this company very well, we originated from the same university, but I've completely forgotten to check their new products now. Thanks.
- postila 10y agoOh. For 500.000 pages per year the ask >5k euro... No way. I need to process ~50M images right now, and then ~50k every day.
- heimatau 10y agoThanks for the example. That's probably the best advertisement. I have a TON of physical notes that I want to turn into text. I know people use Evernote but I never trusted them. I prefer to keep it in-house and this is a solid solution. THANKS!
- criddell 10y agoThat's pretty good! How does it do with your handwriting? I used to use Evernote quite heavily and I've never been able to replace their excellent OCR. I would search for some text and was always blown away when it would find a photo of a whiteboard or a sketch of mine. Any idea what Evernote uses?
- postila 10y agoGood question..
- jumasheff 10y agoSince both ABBYY and Evernote were founded by Russians, I bet Evernote uses FineReader.
- nshm 10y agoIt is not the case. Evernote was created by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Pachikov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Pachikov who also founded Parascript company http://www.parascript.com http://www.parascript.com, which was doing OCR long before Abbyy and is mostly specialized on handwriting. So both technologies are from Russia, but teams are independent.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- danso 10y agoI'm not going to embarrass myself by showing my handwriting. So here's how it does on 3 famous handwritten letters (not well) https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/50dcb5a8f4230e7a8a40bfe2d0a1c836 https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/50dcb5a8f4230e7a8a40bfe2d0...
- wsh91 10y agoGoogle Cloud Platform has an API for it: https://cloud.google.com/vision/ https://cloud.google.com/vision/
- kondor6c 10y agoI have to say, this was the most accurate and quickest method I had tried when it came to OCR.
- danso 10y agoHere's an example (with Python code) of how it performs on street sign data: https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/a0b69c84ebc00c54c94d https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/a0b69c84ebc00c54c94d Unfortunately, it doesn't do well on large chunks of text if you're trying to OCR a scanned document.
- mimic2 10y agoSame result here. Google OCR shines on short text inside images such a streets signs.It works also well on mangas :-)
- xorgar831 10y agoI use ABBYY for Linux: http://www.ocr4linux.com/ http://www.ocr4linux.com/ Everything about it sucks, cost, anual page limit license, I can only run it as root for some reason, but the OCR quality is superb. here's the scripts I use if it's useful: https://github.com/cove/scanbd https://github.com/cove/scanbd
- mimic2 10y agoThe Ocr.space OCR Api works well and has a very generous free tier. And then there is also the Google Vision API, which includes good but basic OCR (but does not support coordinates, just returns plain text)
- Callmenorm 10y agoI just tried two pictures with VINs in them. Both of them were successfully parsed by Google Vision, but OCR.space just errored out. It was not an encouraging result.
- mimic2 10y agoyeah.. Google OCR is better for more challenging tasks, but in my case (OCR on Screenshots and PDF OCR in Chinese and English) the ocr.space soluton works just fine, so I picked it as the most economical solution.