4 ms·

I wouldn't say that full page OCR is trivial. Using an opensource solution (99% based on Tesseract) is going to get you ok-ish results if your input is relative

I wouldn't say that full page OCR is trivial. Using an opensource solution (99% based on Tesseract) is going to get you ok-ish results if your input is relatively clean (no complex layout, scanned documents from a flatbed scanner, standard fonts) and you don't care about speed. If you care about recognition accuracy then Tesseract isn't going to cut it (at least not without some serious effort). Replying to points 1 and 3: For smaller players and/or complex tasks you can always implement your own custom parser. I'm doing work as a contractor in this space.

staticautomatic 9y ago
I agree with you that Tesseract isn't great out of the box, but if you aren't doing huge volumes, there are plenty of cloud options available. Respectfully, I disagree about this being a parsing issue. The whole reason so-called "zonal ocr" exists is because of the challenges of reliably inferring the structure of a document at parsing time. Yes, there are some kinds of documents where parsing logic alone will suffice, but for more complex tasks you need what ABBYY and Nuance are selling.
- ocrcustomserver 9y ago
  Just to be sure that we're talking about the same thing, by "custom parser" I meant implementing your own barebones "zonal OCR" functionality with just the features that are needed for the specific problem. I think it boils down to the needs of each individual application. Some cases have a lot of templates and need the "automatic fuzzy matching" functionality and the extra bells and whistles. But smaller players often deal with just a handful of relatively simple templates where FlexiCapture would just be overkill (not to mention a couple of other problems that I'm covering at the end of the post). This is of course not an easy task because you need someone who can design and implement an end to end system that possibly involves image processing, "zonal OCR", include an OCR engine and also perform reliable text extraction from images/PDFs (extracting text from PDFs is tricky). It's way easier for a non developer to think about what rulesets/logic to apply and not having to think about the image processing/OCR bits. I think that is one of the main selling points of FlexiCapture. It abstracts the OCR bits so that the system designer can think about the problem itself, design a spec and think about the logic the logic. Do you need deskewing of documents? Click a button and you get deskewing. Which brings me to the second point. The products sold by ABBYY/Nuance are meant to be used by integrators (no programming needed other than the occasional VB.net script), not image processing specialists/developers. In my (biased) opinion, it makes more sense for some businesses to go the custom route instead of investing in FlexiCapture. There is also FlexiCapture Engine that is meant for developers. This has the same problems as the other offerings by ABBYY (I don't know about Nuance but I suspect it's the same): - expensive - vendor lock-in - ridiculous extra costs for things like "cloud/VM license", exporting to PDF, etc. - limits on how many pages you can process per year or in total (complex licensing schemes) - ABBYY really wants to sell you their own cluster/cloud management services which is all proprietary - limited flexibility in implementing distributed services, costs that add up fast, you have to be trained in their own stack Can you provide an example where you think that a custom solution would not work? I'm curious.
  - staticautomatic 9y ago
    First of all, why don't you shoot me an email at info@jurymatic.com and we can talk further. In a nutshell, it would have been way more expensive and difficult for us to roll our own than even the high cost of a FlexiCapture license. But here's a reasonably complete explanation of the build vs buy analysis we did. 1. FlexiCapture makes pre-processing incredibly painless and training-free. Beyond the usual binarization stuff, we extensively use the built in auto-rotation and cleanup (skew, noise, speckle, etc.). 2. Templating is really the big win for FlexiCapture. I have not seen anything else with a template GUI that comes close to being as usable, robust, or simple. That's really important to us because we build a LOT of templates. I have a really hard time imagining having to code them. 3. FlexiCapture's template engine is super strong for the kinds of documents we work with, which is mainly complex repeating groups with nested structures. It's also really good at handling both photos of documents (e.g. mobile) and scans. One thing it also offers that I haven't seen elsewhere in a turnkey product or existing platform is the ability to define zones in purely relative terms without absolute positions. I don't know about Nuance but I've not seen any other template GUI that will allow you to spec something like "look for either this word or a two-line string containing these words in the upper left quadrant of the document." 4. There's a dearth of zonal ocr frameworks. Outside of ABBY and Nuance's SDK's, the only one I'm even aware of is OpenKM, and I don't write Java. The FlexiCapture Engine SDK is a terrible beast. The documentation is horrible, it's Windows only, and it's all COM objects.

staticautomatic 9y ago

I agree with you that Tesseract isn't great out of the box, but if you aren't doing huge volumes, there are plenty of cloud options available. Respectfully, I disagree about this being a parsing issue. The whole reason so-called "zonal ocr" exists is because of the challenges of reliably inferring the structure of a document at parsing time. Yes, there are some kinds of documents where parsing logic alone will suffice, but for more complex tasks you need what ABBYY and Nuance are selling.

ocrcustomserver 9y ago
Just to be sure that we're talking about the same thing, by "custom parser" I meant implementing your own barebones "zonal OCR" functionality with just the features that are needed for the specific problem. I think it boils down to the needs of each individual application. Some cases have a lot of templates and need the "automatic fuzzy matching" functionality and the extra bells and whistles. But smaller players often deal with just a handful of relatively simple templates where FlexiCapture would just be overkill (not to mention a couple of other problems that I'm covering at the end of the post). This is of course not an easy task because you need someone who can design and implement an end to end system that possibly involves image processing, "zonal OCR", include an OCR engine and also perform reliable text extraction from images/PDFs (extracting text from PDFs is tricky). It's way easier for a non developer to think about what rulesets/logic to apply and not having to think about the image processing/OCR bits. I think that is one of the main selling points of FlexiCapture. It abstracts the OCR bits so that the system designer can think about the problem itself, design a spec and think about the logic the logic. Do you need deskewing of documents? Click a button and you get deskewing. Which brings me to the second point. The products sold by ABBYY/Nuance are meant to be used by integrators (no programming needed other than the occasional VB.net script), not image processing specialists/developers. In my (biased) opinion, it makes more sense for some businesses to go the custom route instead of investing in FlexiCapture. There is also FlexiCapture Engine that is meant for developers. This has the same problems as the other offerings by ABBYY (I don't know about Nuance but I suspect it's the same): - expensive - vendor lock-in - ridiculous extra costs for things like "cloud/VM license", exporting to PDF, etc. - limits on how many pages you can process per year or in total (complex licensing schemes) - ABBYY really wants to sell you their own cluster/cloud management services which is all proprietary - limited flexibility in implementing distributed services, costs that add up fast, you have to be trained in their own stack Can you provide an example where you think that a custom solution would not work? I'm curious.
- staticautomatic 9y ago
  First of all, why don't you shoot me an email at info@jurymatic.com and we can talk further. In a nutshell, it would have been way more expensive and difficult for us to roll our own than even the high cost of a FlexiCapture license. But here's a reasonably complete explanation of the build vs buy analysis we did. 1. FlexiCapture makes pre-processing incredibly painless and training-free. Beyond the usual binarization stuff, we extensively use the built in auto-rotation and cleanup (skew, noise, speckle, etc.). 2. Templating is really the big win for FlexiCapture. I have not seen anything else with a template GUI that comes close to being as usable, robust, or simple. That's really important to us because we build a LOT of templates. I have a really hard time imagining having to code them. 3. FlexiCapture's template engine is super strong for the kinds of documents we work with, which is mainly complex repeating groups with nested structures. It's also really good at handling both photos of documents (e.g. mobile) and scans. One thing it also offers that I haven't seen elsewhere in a turnkey product or existing platform is the ability to define zones in purely relative terms without absolute positions. I don't know about Nuance but I've not seen any other template GUI that will allow you to spec something like "look for either this word or a two-line string containing these words in the upper left quadrant of the document." 4. There's a dearth of zonal ocr frameworks. Outside of ABBY and Nuance's SDK's, the only one I'm even aware of is OpenKM, and I don't write Java. The FlexiCapture Engine SDK is a terrible beast. The documentation is horrible, it's Windows only, and it's all COM objects.