4 ms·

In case any scientist actually working on adaptive OCR is reading this, I was given a post-WWII newspaper archive (PDF scans, 1945-2006, German language) that I

by jll29 2y ago

In case any scientist actually working on adaptive OCR is reading this, I was given a post-WWII newspaper archive (PDF scans, 1945-2006, German language) that I would like to OCR with the highest quality, compute demands are not an issue, I've got an army of A100s available. I played with OCR post-correction algorithms an invented on method myself in 1994, but haven't worked in that space since. Initial Tesseract and GPT-4o experiments disappoint. Any pointers (papers, software) & collab. suggestions welcome.

mdbmdb 2y ago
I would love to get access to that archive!
ritvikpandey21 2y ago
would love to give this a shot with pulse! feel free to reach out to me at ritvik [at] trypulse [dot] ai, and i’d be very curious to give these a run! in general, i’m happy to give some general advice on algos/models to fine-tune for this task
- sumedh 2y ago
  Are you targeting business or consumers? I cannot find the pricing page.
  - sidmanchkanti21 2y ago
    our current customers are both enterprises and individuals. pricing page is here https://www.runpulse.com/pricing-studio-pulse https://www.runpulse.com/pricing-studio-pulse
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      Not currently looking for this, but can I just say thank you for being open and direct with your prices. So useful to just be able to look. How are you on 18-19th Century cursive, English language. Do you have a guarantee for number of errors.
      - powerhugs 2y ago
        Not OP, but you might be looking for https://www.transkribus.org/ https://www.transkribus.org/
      - sidmanchkanti21 2y ago
        thanks! re: 18-19th century cursive, while we handle historical handwriting, we can't guarantee specific error rates. each document's accuracy varies based on condition, writing style, and preservation. happy to run test samples to check. feel free to send over sample docs: sid [at] trypulse [dot] ai
    - jaggs 2y ago
      No API pricing available?
patcon 2y ago
Pls contact archive.org about adopting this digital archive once it exists (they also have a bad habit of accepting physical donations, if you are nearby)
ahoka 2y ago
I’m very far from an expert, but had good luck with EasyOCR when fiddling with such things.
moffkalast 2y ago
When I was doing OCR for some screenshots last year I managed to get it done with tesseract, but just barely. When looking for alternatives later on I found something called Surya on github which people claim does a lot better and looks quite promising. I've had it bookmarked for testing forever but I haven't gotten around to actually doing it. Maybe worth a try I guess?
- ianhawes 2y ago
  Surya is on par with cloud vision offerings.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
If it's a large enough corpus I imagine it's worth fine tuning to the specific fonts/language used?
zeograd 2y ago
I tried https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR for my own use case (scanline images of parcel labels) and it beat Tesseract by an order of magnitude. (Tesseract managed to get 3 fields out of a damaged label, while PaddleOCR found 35, some of them barely readable even for a human taking time to decypher them)

by jll29 2y ago

mdbmdb 2y ago

I would love to get access to that archive!

ritvikpandey21 2y ago

would love to give this a shot with pulse! feel free to reach out to me at ritvik [at] trypulse [dot] ai, and i’d be very curious to give these a run! in general, i’m happy to give some general advice on algos/models to fine-tune for this task

sumedh 2y ago
Are you targeting business or consumers? I cannot find the pricing page.
- sidmanchkanti21 2y ago
  our current customers are both enterprises and individuals. pricing page is here https://www.runpulse.com/pricing-studio-pulse https://www.runpulse.com/pricing-studio-pulse
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    Not currently looking for this, but can I just say thank you for being open and direct with your prices. So useful to just be able to look. How are you on 18-19th Century cursive, English language. Do you have a guarantee for number of errors.
    - powerhugs 2y ago
      Not OP, but you might be looking for https://www.transkribus.org/ https://www.transkribus.org/
    - sidmanchkanti21 2y ago
      thanks! re: 18-19th century cursive, while we handle historical handwriting, we can't guarantee specific error rates. each document's accuracy varies based on condition, writing style, and preservation. happy to run test samples to check. feel free to send over sample docs: sid [at] trypulse [dot] ai
  - jaggs 2y ago
    No API pricing available?

patcon 2y ago

Pls contact archive.org about adopting this digital archive once it exists (they also have a bad habit of accepting physical donations, if you are nearby)

ahoka 2y ago

I’m very far from an expert, but had good luck with EasyOCR when fiddling with such things.

moffkalast 2y ago

When I was doing OCR for some screenshots last year I managed to get it done with tesseract, but just barely. When looking for alternatives later on I found something called Surya on github which people claim does a lot better and looks quite promising. I've had it bookmarked for testing forever but I haven't gotten around to actually doing it. Maybe worth a try I guess?

ianhawes 2y ago
Surya is on par with cloud vision offerings.

pbhjpbhj 2y ago

If it's a large enough corpus I imagine it's worth fine tuning to the specific fonts/language used?

zeograd 2y ago

I tried https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR for my own use case (scanline images of parcel labels) and it beat Tesseract by an order of magnitude. (Tesseract managed to get 3 fields out of a damaged label, while PaddleOCR found 35, some of them barely readable even for a human taking time to decypher them)