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Wish someone benchmarked Apple Vision Framework against these others. It's built into most Apple devices, but people don't know you can actually harness it to d
by hakunin 1y ago
Wish someone benchmarked Apple Vision Framework against these others. It's built into most Apple devices, but people don't know you can actually harness it to do fast, good quality OCR for you (and go a few extra steps to produce searchable pdfs, which is my typical use case). I'm very curious where it would fall in the benchmarks.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoIt is unusable trash for languages with any vertical writing such as Japanese. It simply doesn’t work.
- thekid314 1y agoYeah, and fails quickly at anything handwritten.
- hakunin 1y agoI mostly OCR English, so Japanese (as mentioned by parent) wouldn't be an issue for me, but I do care about handwriting. See, these insights are super helpful. If only there was, say, a benchmark to show these. My main question really is: what are practical OCR tools that I can string together on my MacBook Pro M1 Max w/ 64GB Ram to maximize OCR quality for lots of mail and schoolwork coming into my house, all mostly in English. I use ScanSnap Manager with its built in OCR tools, but that's probably super outdated by now. Apple Vision does way better job than that. I heard people say also that Apple Vision is better than Tesseract. But is there something better still that's also practical to run in a scripted environment on my machine?
- wahnfrieden 1y agoLiveText too? It has a newer engine
- hakunin 1y agoThis is the second comment of yours about LiveText (this is the older one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192141) — I found that one by complete coincidence because I'm trying to provide a Ruby API for these frameworks. However, I can't find much info on LiveText? What framework is it part of? Do you have any links or any additional info? I found a source where they say it's specifically for screen and camera capturing.
- wahnfrieden 1y agohttps://developer.apple.com/documentation/visionkit/imageanalyzer https://developer.apple.com/documentation/visionkit/imageana... VisionKit. Swift-only (as with many new APIs) so lots of people stuck on ObjC bridges simply ignore it. It does not provide bounding boxes but you can get text.
- hakunin 1y agoThat's great, I'm going to give this a shot. If you have any more resources please do share. I don't mind Swift-only, because I'm writing little shims with `@_cdecl` for the bridge (don't have much experience here, but hoping this is going to work, leaning on AI for support).
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoYeah, if it was cross-platform maybe more people would be curious about it, but something that can only run on ~10% of the hardware people have doesn't make it very attractive to even begin to spend time on Apple-exclusive stuff.
- ch1234 1y agoBut you can have an apple device deployed in your stack to handle the OCR, right? I get on-device is a hardware limitation for many, but if you have an apple device in your stack, can’t you leverage this?
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoYeah, but handling macOS is a infrastructure-capacity sucks, Apple really doesn't want you to so tooling is almost none existing. I've setup CI/CD stacks before that needed macOS builders and it's always the most cumbersome machines to manage as infrastructure.
- coder543 1y agoAWS literally lets you deploy Macs as EC2 instances, which I believe includes all of AWS's usual EBS storage and disk imaging features.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoAlright, so now the easy thing is done, now how do you actually manage them, keep them running and do introspection without resorting to SSH or even remote desktop?
- coder543 1y agoHow do you manage any EC2 instance “without resorting to SSH”? Even for Linux EC2 instances, the right answer is often tools like Ansible, which do still use SSH under the hood.
- graeme 1y agoInteresting. How do you harness it for that purpose? I've found apple ocr to be very good.
- hakunin 1y agoThe short answer is a tool like OwlOCR (which also has CLI support). The long answer is that there are tools on github (I created the stars list: https://github.com/stars/maxim/lists/apple-vision-framework/ https://github.com/stars/maxim/lists/apple-vision-framework/) that try to use the framework for various things. I’m also trying to build an ffi-based Ruby gem that provides convenient access in Ruby to the framework’s functionality.
- ah27182 1y agoApple shortcuts allows you to use OCR on images you pass into it. Looking for “ Extract Text from Image”