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Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF
- foota 9y agoOn my phone so I don't have a chance to give it a shot, but what I find has been most irritating in the past about ocr is the accuracy. If your extension has better accuracy you might call that out.
- imron 9y agoI saw the heading on HN and thought "I wonder if it works with Chinese". I saw the first example screenshot on the page was a Chinese movie and thought "Great, it does" I saw the enlarged version of the screenshot and the Chinese subtitles contain multiple mistakes: "Nice try, but maybe not so great after all for the use case I'd personally be interested in".
- a9t9 9y agoWell, at least this confirms that the screenshots are not manipulated ;) The tricky part for the OCR in this example is the diverse background, as the Chinese characters are directly inside the movie. Your comment is interesting, as the original motivation for creating the Copyfish extension was to help me watch Chinese movies. So I can confirm that for this purpose, it works fine. Of course, once in a while it gets some characters wrong but it works ok with many movies. Here is a screencast of Copyfish doing subtitle OCR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNGkGWj8lA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNGkGWj8lA4
- imron 9y ago> as the Chinese characters are directly inside the movie. Yep, same with TV shows, and soft-copies of transcripts are difficult to come by, hence my interest in something like this. I just watched the video. When used on a video does it keep a history of all OCRed text? Finally, you might also like to try posting this on http://www.chinese-forums.com http://www.chinese-forums.com If it mostly works well for TV and films, I'm sure there will be quite a few people there who are interested in it.
- a9t9 9y ago> When used on a video does it keep a history of all OCRed text? Not yet - but this feature is already on my todo list ;) Thanks for the hint about the chinese forums!
- imron 9y ago> Not yet - but this feature is already on my todo list ;) Another interesting feature would be to do some sort of statistical analysis of Chinese text being OCRed and then combining that with possible characters suggested by the OCR. This would almost certainly prevent the mistake in the last two characters of the Chinese movie screenshot.
- Nimsical 9y agoThis is cool! Wondering what you're using for OCR?
- jffry 9y agoFor developers: Copyfish is published under the GPL open-source license. As OCR software, it uses the free OCR API from https://ocr.space/
- whitten 9y agoSo, to answer the question mentioned above, the document storing the text is sent to an off-site server (https://ocr.space/ https://ocr.space/) which does the OCR and returns the results.
- tobltobs 9y agoAnd what lib is using ocr.space for OCR?
- tangue 9y agoI suspect they're using Tesseract as they've written a gui for it ( https://ocr.space/blog/p/free-ocr-windows.html https://ocr.space/blog/p/free-ocr-windows.html ) but there's no way to find more.
- samfisher83 9y agohttps://github.com/A9T9/Free-OCR-Software https://github.com/A9T9/Free-OCR-Software Based on this github they might be using the microsoft ocr library.
- PokemonNoGo 9y agoI guess it auto defaults to English then? Running Tesseract on Scandinavian texts gives AAO instead of ÅÄÖ in my experience if you don't supply the correct language training set. That's quite the hen and the egg problem. Can't language identify without the text can't get the text without the right language identified.
- zhangkehu 9y agowanderful tool,we can get text from some pdf file easyly.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ImJasonH 9y agoSimilar Chrome extension I wrote using Google Cloud APIs: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-vision/nblmokgbialjjgfhfofbgfcghhbkejac?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-vision/nblmo...
- mdani 9y agoNo need to use third-party extensions if you have a Google cloud account. You can download https://github.com/kaneshin/pigeon https://github.com/kaneshin/pigeon and just run it from command line - protects privacy and more secure compared to relying on third-parties.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoIsn't Google a third-party?
- Zyst 9y agoIt is actually on Chrome as well: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/copyfish-%F0%9F%90%9F-free-ocr-soft/eenjdnjldapjajjofmldgmkjaienebbj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/copyfish-%F0%9F%90... I started using it a bit ago, the area selection seems a bit wonky, but otherwise works.
- gressquel 9y agoIs the OCR-extraction performed in the client? if its transferred to a server then people should be aware of this so sensitive data from documents/pdf is not submitted.
- qz_ 9y agoYeah apparently it uses https://ocr.space/ https://ocr.space/, deal-breaker for me.
- a9t9 9y agoI understand that hosted OCR, just like SaaS in general, is not suitable for every use case. On the other hand, the OCR.space OCR API has a very strict privacy policy: https://ocr.space/privacypolicy https://ocr.space/privacypolicy - All uploaded images and the extracted text are deleted immediatly after processing.
- stingraycharles 9y agoI suggest adding a big notification dialog that explains this when you first try to do an OCR request.
- cantrevealname 9y ago> All uploaded images and the extracted text are deleted immediately Until they are served with a subpoena for a particular client, or a sweeping subpoena to store everything forever, or the company is sold and the new parent has different values, or the company decides to mine customer data for advertising uses, or there's a bug in the software, or there's a long-lived cache of the data, or it gets into their backups accidentally or deliberately, or they don't keep the data but keep "just" the meta-data, or they do statistics or analytics before deleting the data, or they are hacked, or they simply change their minds. In terms of privacy, even a non-free non-open-source local app with DRM or license management is better than a server app with a "strict privacy policy". With a good firewall setup, you can be pretty sure that the local app won't betray you.
- ransom1538 9y agoIs this using TesseractOCR?
- dontchooseanick 9y agoCopyphish ?
- CM30 9y agoHmm, I've seen a few apps and extensions like this before. I think Project Naptha was a heavily advertised one that did the same thing a few years back. But how's the accuracy here? Cause when I used previous plugins for this functionality, I often found they'd return gibberish if the text was even slightly ambiguous looking in image form. How does it compare to the other plugins doing the same thing here?
- maggit 9y agoThe text on the linked page actually compares this to Project Naptha: > For extension gurus: You might have heard of Project Naptha, a great addon that applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. Copyfish solves the same problem, but it takes a different user interface approach. It does not try to alter the website. Instead, it lets you mark the text in the image that you want to extract. As a result Copyfish works with every website, even videos and PDF documents.
- xophishox 9y agoGive me an api end point to send an image to, and a text response. Ill hand you cash.
- jklinger410 9y agoSame
- Nadya 9y agoFrom the creators of Copyfish: https://ocr.space/ https://ocr.space/ They should have an API to point to. It is fairly accurate. I use them occasionally via ShareX, which uses their API for OCR. E: https://ocr.space/ocrapi https://ocr.space/ocrapi
- ythn 9y agoUnder the hood, the extension is using: https://ocr.space/ocrapi https://ocr.space/ocrapi
- RhodesianHunter 9y agoThere are a ton of these now. Google provides OCR as part of their machine vision API. AWS has similar with Rekognition. As others have mentioned, there are dozens of others on less well known platforms.
- gressquel 9y agoRekognition from Amazon doesnt have OCR as far as I remember
- a9t9 9y agoActually, based on my tests, there are only a few good services: Abbyy (best recognition rate but by far most expensive), Google Cloud Vision (second best recognition rate), Microsoft OCR and... our OCR.space service with a very generous free tier and a competitive priced PRO tier.
- ocrcustomserver 9y agoLike a9t9 said, ABBYY, Microsoft and Google offer this. If your images however differ from the typical text document, recognition from those services will fail. OCR is highly dependent on the particular application and the kind of images that you're dealing with. Preprocessing and segmentation are very important. If you need a custom solution, my email is in my profile.
- sjs382 9y agoCould you add an email address to your HN profile so I can contact you?
- a9t9 9y agoDone. In addition, the email listed on https://github.com/A9T9 https://github.com/A9T9 also reaches me.
- vdRrsithZm 9y agoNeat brother. +1 = A109
- vdRrsithZm 9y ago> Done. In addition, the email listed on https://github.com/A9T9 https://github.com/A9T9 also reaches me. Neat! Brother. +1 =100 Ace
- RhodesianHunter 9y agoSemi related: I would love to see someone do a comparison of the various OCR APIs on speed, accuracy, and cost.
- asenna 9y agoSame here. Was just researching on this. Not sure if I should go with an open source OCR engine or one of these APIs
- RhodesianHunter 9y agoDoing it yourself with Tesseract is pretty hard (time consuming, error prone). It's something I would only consider doing once my project was build, viable, and the costs of an API were an issue.
- ocrcustomserver 9y agohttps://ocr.space/blog/2015/02/ocr-online-converter-review.html https://ocr.space/blog/2015/02/ocr-online-converter-review.h...
- angry_octet 9y agoWe need to evolve a grammar for describing privacy implications, because proper classification of this software would allow it to be marked as malware/spyware. It is beyond irresponsible for mozilla to do nothing to prevent this malware from being recommended on their platform.
- Nadya 9y agoMaybe I'm missing something - but it only OCR's things you choose to capture and isn't constantly trying to OCR every single thing you see. Are you misunderstanding the extension or am I missing something bigger? E: A total guess: "the server will see the image you are trying to OCR"? That's about as much privacy as I could see being intruded upon.
- angry_octet 9y agoIt could easily build a profile of everything you get scanned/translated. I don't know if it uses https, so maybe it encrypts, maybe everyone listening can see what you get scanned. It is good that it isn't scanning everything, i.e. complete exfiltration, but that is a low bar. It leaks every time you use it.
- mholt 9y agoEven the name is too reminiscent of Superfish.
- ghostly_s 9y agoHow about you explain what on earth you're talking about if you're going to take the time to disparage this product here?
- angry_octet 9y agoRead the page. Yes, it isn't obvious is it? Look down the bottom. https://ocr.space/ https://ocr.space/ It uploads everything to a commercial OCR service. Which provides these CPU cycles 'for free'. Who owns this data? Do you have a privacy agreement with ocr.space? Can you trust them as far as you could spit? It doesn't matter that this is documented though. Unless it had a popup banner EVERY TIME YOU USED IT saying "Your data will be sent to a cloud service for OCR, which may keep/index/sell you data without restriction."
- Zyst 9y agoThis seems cool, I just tried it in chrome and it has support for pop-up dictionaries, so I'll be using this for some beginner reading assistance. Thanks for making this!
- chrischen 9y agoNeed this for mobile. Somehow it became a defining characteristic of an "App" to disable text selection.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoShould be fixable via accessibility APIs?
- bondolo 9y agoThis seems like it could be very useful for accessibility applications.
- TekMol 9y agoWhat is the business model of free extensions like these? Is it all spyware/malware? It looks like many free extensions either have malware in them from the start or get sold to malware companies later on, who then deploy the malware via updates: http://lifehacker.com/many-browser-extensions-have-become-adware-or-malware-1505117457 http://lifehacker.com/many-browser-extensions-have-become-ad...
- irrational 9y agoWhy does everything have to have a business model? Sometimes people like to create things for the sure enjoyment of creating things or they have an itch to scratch and think others might have the same need. Not everything is nefarious.
- Volt 9y agoExactly for the reason they said. The concern isn't that extensions are necessarily nefarious, but that people often want something in return for their work, which might be money by whatever means.
- eriknstr 9y agoI recently found an interesting issue [1] filed in public on the GitHub repository of a fork of a popular extension. Here are archived versions of the URLs mentioned in the issue: Without "partner extension": http://archive.is/anu2E http://archive.is/anu2E With "partner extension": http://archive.is/bp93l http://archive.is/bp93l As is evident, what their "partner extension" does is in fact maliciously hijacking and replacing ad-space on websites visited by the user. Strangely, searching for their name among the issues on GitHub does not show other such results. I guess they usually make contact directly and that the person at that company who filed this issue did not realize it would be visible to the public. Here is the full text of the issue: > Adnow is interested in byuiing your extension traffic #1 > Dear Kyong Tsu, > My name is Anastasia, I am a manager from international advertising network Adnow. > Extension traffic is a hot trend nowadays, and we are interested in buying traffic from Facebook Video Downloader extension and the others. We are ready to share an idea of monetization extensions with you and give you a method. > We offer: > * high payouts > * 100% fill rate (we buy traffic from all over the world) > * Integration through JS Tag / XML / JSON feed > * Integration method > That's how the page looks without partner extension: https://gyazo.com/5d635a9dc7bdc142e18e6775a1d1340d https://gyazo.com/5d635a9dc7bdc142e18e6775a1d1340d > And that's how it looks for user with our plugin/code in extension: https://gyazo.com/a2b48b16d304a3ba37cdf6967fa4d9d8 https://gyazo.com/a2b48b16d304a3ba37cdf6967fa4d9d8 > Please contact me in case you are interested in monetization your extensions. > I am looking forward to your answer. > Thank you in advance. > Best regards, > -- > Anastasia Nova > Sales manager | Adnow LLP > e.: tasya@sales.adnow.com > Skype: tasya@adnow.com [1]: https://github.com/KyongTsu/TabMemorySaver/issues/1 https://github.com/KyongTsu/TabMemorySaver/issues/1 Archived snapshot of above issue: http://archive.is/Z5mJl http://archive.is/Z5mJl