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OCR by uploading images to Google Docs
- nodata 16y agoDoes anyone know if this uses Google's open source tesseract-ocr software?
- l0nwlf 16y agoI was unable to find any reference regarding this. Personally gocr worked better for me than tessearct/pytesseract. Google docs inbuilt OCR gives pretty satisfactory results too.
- joakin 16y agoWow I just tested with an image, and you get a GDoc with the image on top and the OCRed text in the bottom. Pretty cool. I wonder what are they using for Google Goggles and this
- CWuestefeld 16y agoI find it tremendously frustrating that so many people are creating this problem for themselves. Anything that needs to be data should be data, not images. Except for some very specific cases, you're not doing anybody any favors by outputting PDF. That format is a data black hole. It allows you to transmit very well-formatted output, but it absolutely stops you from reliably using anything in that content. I beg you all: if it's anything that contains data, or really, if it's anything for which layout and formatting is not absolutely critical, please don't use PDF. Send data as data.
- alecco 16y agoIt's not that easy. What about fonts?
- CWuestefeld 16y agoDo you care about the data, or do you care about the fonts? These don't usually coincide.
- khandelwal 16y agoLayout often also conveys information, and makes documents easier to read. Fonts are part of that layout information, but so is spacing.
- slouch 16y ago99% of the time I want to OCR a document or image I am not the creator of said item.
- CWuestefeld 16y agoObviously. But if we could make everyone understand, then we'd be covered. Every few months here, we get a customer asking why we can't automatically handle purchase orders that they send us in PDF format, and every time they get the same explanation.
- nostrademons 16y agoIf we could make everyone understand, we wouldn't need computer programmers. We could just have computers talk to each other, and all their formats would be magically compatible, and the vast body of data conversion code wouldn't exist. The problem is that computers are made for humans, and humans are often wantonly illogical. You're not going to change this, short of Skynet and the rise of the machines. So it makes sense to put up with a fair amount of coding pain to make things easier for your users. It's lucrative, at least. Think of it as a full-employment theorem for data-miners.
- haribilalic 16y agoI scan in all my documents as PDFs. The text, including tables, gets scanned in as text. I can copy from the document and paste it anywhere else. Spotlight and Google can index the PDFs. The only thing I can't do easily is edit the documents, but I don't need to do that with scanned documents (e.g. tax statements).
- Tichy 16y agoIs there an API by any chance?
- mseebach 16y agoI suppose this will work: http://code.google.com/apis/documents/ http://code.google.com/apis/documents/ You can both upload and specify format when downloading. I guess that includes the OCR applied if necessary.
- trezor 16y agoTrying to improve some scanned forms I have, I got an average of 5 characters per page recognized. Also form formatting recognized as "1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1". I may not rely entirely on google docs for my OCR needs in future ;)
- andybak 16y agoCan you upload your document or part of it somewhere where others can take a look? I find it hard to believe Google would release this if it was that useless (no jokes about Buzz or Wave, please).
- Estragon 16y agoIncidentally, I noticed that if you try to use tesseract on an image taken from a Google Books page, you get terrible OCR accuracy. Anyone know why that is?
- zzleeper 16y agoI recall that on some google-scanned books, there was some metadata from abbyy finereader. So that may be why. Also, tesseract often needs to be configured.
- oo 16y agoCan I use this to break a CAPTCHA?
- anty 16y agoIn case anyone wonders: I tried if Google could solve its own captchas. It can, if each character is separated, but once they overlap, like they usually do, it doesn't work.
- mikecane 16y agoG1ver whar OCR locks lice in g00gLe ePubs in g0og1e Buuks, th1s w111 du we11.
- rorrr 16y agoI wonder what's stronger - google OCR or google captcha?
- ylem 16y agoHas anyone checked to see if this works with Japanese, Korean, or Chinese? What about Arabic or Hindi? This would shed some light on whether it's likely to be tesseract or ocrpus....