3 ms·

OCR is hard, but maybe we can make some real progress on it now with modern AI. A context-smart church records handwriting transcriber would be pretty great.

conceptme 4y ago
https://readcoop.eu https://readcoop.eu transckribus is quite nice for handwritten ocr.
- driscoll42 4y ago
  Know of any good handwritten OCR libraries that are FOSS? And ideally can be called through python? TrOCR is the best I've seen so far though it's not amazing.
msla 4y ago
The problem with that is the same as the problem with all modern AI, it seems: AI hallucinations, which get more plausible the better the model is. Humans see things, too, but humans can have the insight to know when they're unsure and leave lacunae in the transcription with a note to come back later and discuss it with others. AIs don't have that ability, and so always seem certain.
- vintermann 4y ago
  No, they already have the ability to be uncertain if you are careful what you ask for. And I don't buy that it's some fundamental weakness: I'm sure we'll be much better at dealing with uncertainty a month and a year from now. But of course, they will always sometimes be wrong, just like humans.
flangola7 4y ago
It's not cheap but GPT-4 handles it. I'm in the image processing private beta and its failure rate on text is well below the human baseline. Cursive, damaged, pixelated, 5 year old hand writing, weird lighting or angles, highly stylized, artificially distorted or obstructed, poor contrast. Doesn't matter. My instincts tell me they haven't made it public yet because it will end captchas for good and they're uneasy about rug pulling the entire public internet. Any image obfuscated to a point of defeating the LLM will also defeat the majority of humans.
- vintermann 4y ago
  Can I suggest some truly horrible church record handwriting for you to try? Here's a fairly moderate example: https://media.digitalarkivet.no/view/7442/155 https://media.digitalarkivet.no/view/7442/155

conceptme 4y ago

https://readcoop.eu https://readcoop.eu transckribus is quite nice for handwritten ocr.

driscoll42 4y ago
Know of any good handwritten OCR libraries that are FOSS? And ideally can be called through python? TrOCR is the best I've seen so far though it's not amazing.

msla 4y ago

The problem with that is the same as the problem with all modern AI, it seems: AI hallucinations, which get more plausible the better the model is. Humans see things, too, but humans can have the insight to know when they're unsure and leave lacunae in the transcription with a note to come back later and discuss it with others. AIs don't have that ability, and so always seem certain.

vintermann 4y ago
No, they already have the ability to be uncertain if you are careful what you ask for. And I don't buy that it's some fundamental weakness: I'm sure we'll be much better at dealing with uncertainty a month and a year from now. But of course, they will always sometimes be wrong, just like humans.

flangola7 4y ago

It's not cheap but GPT-4 handles it. I'm in the image processing private beta and its failure rate on text is well below the human baseline. Cursive, damaged, pixelated, 5 year old hand writing, weird lighting or angles, highly stylized, artificially distorted or obstructed, poor contrast. Doesn't matter. My instincts tell me they haven't made it public yet because it will end captchas for good and they're uneasy about rug pulling the entire public internet. Any image obfuscated to a point of defeating the LLM will also defeat the majority of humans.

vintermann 4y ago
Can I suggest some truly horrible church record handwriting for you to try? Here's a fairly moderate example: https://media.digitalarkivet.no/view/7442/155 https://media.digitalarkivet.no/view/7442/155