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I thought this was going to be some adversarial neural network. Unfortunately OP, I don't think your solution even works for your intended use case; Google alr

I thought this was going to be some adversarial neural network. Unfortunately OP, I don't think your solution even works for your intended use case; Google already does OCR (actual OCR, not just parsing text) in Images. I use it in Gmail quite often. Regardless the implementation is quite neat and will surely thwart less advanced indexers.

social_quotient 4y ago
Does it ocr on live text pdfs or just pdfs that have text in images/flattened?
ben_w 4y ago
Likewise iOS, text in screenshots is selectable and in this case it is recognised correctly.
nmstoker 4y ago
Adding to this, it's trivial to get the human readable text on a Google phone: switch between apps and pick the app with the text but don't jump back into the app yet, select text and you can immediately copy the text out. It's yielding the visible text, so most be OCR'ing the image (works offline too). When i copy direct from the example on the web page, in the non-OCR method, that does give the messed up text, but not when done the way above. " Phone: 514-867-5309" was copied out easily (can't be bothered to go back get the Cell bit i was just inaccurate copying, I'm sure it works!)
viggity 4y ago
thank you to everyone in this thread who realize it was never meant to be perfect and appreciating it for what it does do!
- SilasX 4y ago
  The point isn't that it has flaws, but that its description is wrong. "Non-human eyes" -- normally understood to be OCR -- read it just fine. I think most of us were expecting something that disrupts "computer eyes" (e.g. because of deceiving overly narrow "tricks" that neural networks use to identify characters) but left it readable for the typical human (like an easy Captcha). A more accurate (and helpful!) description of the problem you're solving is that this disrupts text parsers. That is, any program that just reads this in as text won't see the "real" letters (unless it's been pre-programmed with a specific reverser, etc.) and thus will frustrate, say, text search. Which, on that note, I notice elsewhere you mention this being a solution applied to document submission in legal proceedings. In that case, the assumption might be that one side wishes to run text searches and assume its compatible with that. In that case, this could be viewed as non-compliance with a judge's orders, so FYI.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

social_quotient 4y ago

Does it ocr on live text pdfs or just pdfs that have text in images/flattened?

ben_w 4y ago

Likewise iOS, text in screenshots is selectable and in this case it is recognised correctly.

nmstoker 4y ago

Adding to this, it's trivial to get the human readable text on a Google phone: switch between apps and pick the app with the text but don't jump back into the app yet, select text and you can immediately copy the text out. It's yielding the visible text, so most be OCR'ing the image (works offline too). When i copy direct from the example on the web page, in the non-OCR method, that does give the messed up text, but not when done the way above. " Phone: 514-867-5309" was copied out easily (can't be bothered to go back get the Cell bit i was just inaccurate copying, I'm sure it works!)

viggity 4y ago

thank you to everyone in this thread who realize it was never meant to be perfect and appreciating it for what it does do!

SilasX 4y ago
The point isn't that it has flaws, but that its description is wrong. "Non-human eyes" -- normally understood to be OCR -- read it just fine. I think most of us were expecting something that disrupts "computer eyes" (e.g. because of deceiving overly narrow "tricks" that neural networks use to identify characters) but left it readable for the typical human (like an easy Captcha). A more accurate (and helpful!) description of the problem you're solving is that this disrupts text parsers. That is, any program that just reads this in as text won't see the "real" letters (unless it's been pre-programmed with a specific reverser, etc.) and thus will frustrate, say, text search. Which, on that note, I notice elsewhere you mention this being a solution applied to document submission in legal proceedings. In that case, the assumption might be that one side wishes to run text searches and assume its compatible with that. In that case, this could be viewed as non-compliance with a judge's orders, so FYI.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]