Some thoughts (adding to staticautomatic's post): 1. There is no dataset/competition like ImageNet for OCR. 2. Most people/conferences/universities are going

Some thoughts (adding to staticautomatic's post): 1. There is no dataset/competition like ImageNet for OCR. 2. Most people/conferences/universities are going after natural images and "computer vision" problems. OCR is its own animal and while it shares some concepts with computer vision it's not the same thing. 3. A lot of IP, knowledge and talent locked up in a handful of very old companies doing this for a long time. ABBYY is for OCR what Google + Facebook are for deep learning (maybe more). 4. OCR is kind of a niche, a lot of knowledge is not available to many people outside of a few insiders (ABBYY/Nuance, universities, research labs, OCR conferences). I'm sure Google uses it a lot internally (e.g. Google Street View numbers etc.). 5. The incumbents don't just do OCR. They do preprocessing (computer vision/image processing) + OCR + NLP. 6. Hard to find data. ABBYY Finereader supports 190 languages. Collecting this data is no easy task. I'm probably missing other reasons as well, but this is just off the top of my head. That being said, I'm sure that there's going to be a lot of progress in the OCR + deep learning space soon.