5 ms·

Open Source OCR in JavaScript

111 points by aram 12y ago

jeffehobbs 12y ago
This is hot. Nice work.
walterbell 12y ago
How does Ocrad compare to Abbyy in quality?
- unhammer 12y ago
  http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2010-06/15-linux_ocr_software_comparison http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2010-06/15-linux_ocr_software... is a very simple comparison (linked from the post). So with a small enough test set, abbyy is infinitely better
PhrosTT 12y ago
I looked at this recently to try to pick some values off a high res png of a pdf. That was a little too ambitious for this library. It's probably good for smaller images with a few words.
wdmeldon 12y ago
I liked that the demo shows the program failing. Nice to see the capabilities AND the limitations displayed front an center. Definitely impressive.
joereggan190 12y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/suinegdik/comments/2c4ze5/ http://www.reddit.com/r/suinegdik/comments/2c4ze5/
mrfusion 12y ago
Would this be an easy way to get OCR into an iPhone app with phone gap? Could it operate on a live video feed?
- jfoster 12y ago
  Doing anything to a live video feed in JS on a phone probably won't be very feasible except for extremely low resolution video.
- gry 12y ago
  It might be easy, but until iOS 8 is released, non-Safari JS still takes a performance hit. [1] You may want to take a look at the Tesseract library and Objective-C wrapper. [2] [1] http://9to5mac.com/2014/06/03/ios-8-webkit-changes-finally-allow-all-apps-to-have-the-same-performance-as-safari/ http://9to5mac.com/2014/06/03/ios-8-webkit-changes-finally-a... [2] https://github.com/ldiqual/tesseract-ios https://github.com/ldiqual/tesseract-ios edit: Looking closer at this lib, impressive. Might give it a go.
cheshire137 12y ago
I kept giggling at its poor recognition. It's comically bad, but I think it's a step in the right direction. It was very fast at incorrectly identifying letters. If only it were very fast and mostly correct.
- azakai 12y ago
  It is good at recognizing machine-generated text - hit the blue arrow - and not that good at human-scribbled text with a mouse, I find. I assume you were testing hand-written text?
jfoster 12y ago
I am a bit surprised at how low the accuracy seems to be. Does anyone know if this is typical just of OCR done in JS, or OCR in general? I am aware that at least one or two implementations are extremely good (eg. Google ones) but are those complete outliers?
- jahewson 12y ago
  Ocrad is not very powerful, it uses hand-written recognisers (one per character) to identify the shapes of the characters. Compare this with more modern libraries such as Tesseract which use neural networks and OCRopus which adds language modelling.
- SIGALRM 12y ago
  in my humble experience using OCR programs, there is always a considerable amount inaccuracy. no matter what font I use or font size, I always either end up proof reading the scanned document or just typing it by hand. the letter "O" is almost always translated by the OCR as a "0" or a zero is translated as an "O". it can be pretty frustrating.
  - iLoch 12y ago
    I wish there was a library that allowed you to input expected data (ex: we expect to see zeros 20% more often then the letter O), then the interpreter could compare against that fact and determine the likelihood of it being each letter. As it stands for most libraries that I'm aware of, you just have to get the data and run your own tests to see whether it should be an O or a zero.
  - Zergy 12y ago
    I used the ABBYY orc engine to digitize printed documents (idk why they couldn't just keep around the file used to print) and it was quite accurate. At worst one out of a couple hundred would have enough issues where readability was an issue.
    - gfosco 12y ago
      Similar experience here, when building a mobile app that did OCR + translations.. As long as the source image was in decent shape, ABBYY did very well. It's also incredibly expensive.
systematical 12y ago
Hand writing my name Chris was difficult for it to pick up. It kept thinking my "C" was an "L" and putting spaces in between letters. Also determined my "S" was an underscore. Still pretty cool. Thanks!
- alistairjcbrown 12y ago
  Looks like underscore character ("_") is used when the letter can't be determined - so in fact it had no idea what your "S" was ^_^
alistairjcbrown 12y ago
Interesting - I've had the Project Naptha (http://projectnaptha.com/ http://projectnaptha.com/) Chrome extension installed without really looking under the hood. Turns out it has Ocrad.js and Tesseract as two engine options - it uses them to automaticaly convert images on the page to selectable text.
- paulirish 12y ago
  Yup! And Naptha and Ocrad.js are both authored by antimatter15.
bignis 12y ago
It demos well, but then I tried a simple test - a photograph of some text (http://imgur.com/TCnGlZG http://imgur.com/TCnGlZG), Ocrad.js utterly failed at it, almost all letters were incorrect.
fnordsensei 12y ago
Love the idea of it. However, I threw some random Swedish at it, and it didn't fare too well. http://imgur.com/nZLtoj5 http://imgur.com/nZLtoj5 Kudos for the effort though!
mlinksva 12y ago
It'd be nice to be able to invoke this from within PDF.js.

111 points by aram 12y ago

jeffehobbs 12y ago

This is hot. Nice work.

walterbell 12y ago

How does Ocrad compare to Abbyy in quality?

unhammer 12y ago
http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2010-06/15-linux_ocr_software_comparison http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2010-06/15-linux_ocr_software... is a very simple comparison (linked from the post). So with a small enough test set, abbyy is infinitely better

PhrosTT 12y ago

I looked at this recently to try to pick some values off a high res png of a pdf. That was a little too ambitious for this library. It's probably good for smaller images with a few words.

wdmeldon 12y ago

I liked that the demo shows the program failing. Nice to see the capabilities AND the limitations displayed front an center. Definitely impressive.

joereggan190 12y ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/suinegdik/comments/2c4ze5/ http://www.reddit.com/r/suinegdik/comments/2c4ze5/

mrfusion 12y ago

Would this be an easy way to get OCR into an iPhone app with phone gap? Could it operate on a live video feed?

jfoster 12y ago
Doing anything to a live video feed in JS on a phone probably won't be very feasible except for extremely low resolution video.
gry 12y ago
It might be easy, but until iOS 8 is released, non-Safari JS still takes a performance hit. [1] You may want to take a look at the Tesseract library and Objective-C wrapper. [2] [1] http://9to5mac.com/2014/06/03/ios-8-webkit-changes-finally-allow-all-apps-to-have-the-same-performance-as-safari/ http://9to5mac.com/2014/06/03/ios-8-webkit-changes-finally-a... [2] https://github.com/ldiqual/tesseract-ios https://github.com/ldiqual/tesseract-ios edit: Looking closer at this lib, impressive. Might give it a go.

cheshire137 12y ago

I kept giggling at its poor recognition. It's comically bad, but I think it's a step in the right direction. It was very fast at incorrectly identifying letters. If only it were very fast and mostly correct.

azakai 12y ago
It is good at recognizing machine-generated text - hit the blue arrow - and not that good at human-scribbled text with a mouse, I find. I assume you were testing hand-written text?

jfoster 12y ago

I am a bit surprised at how low the accuracy seems to be. Does anyone know if this is typical just of OCR done in JS, or OCR in general? I am aware that at least one or two implementations are extremely good (eg. Google ones) but are those complete outliers?

jahewson 12y ago
Ocrad is not very powerful, it uses hand-written recognisers (one per character) to identify the shapes of the characters. Compare this with more modern libraries such as Tesseract which use neural networks and OCRopus which adds language modelling.
SIGALRM 12y ago
in my humble experience using OCR programs, there is always a considerable amount inaccuracy. no matter what font I use or font size, I always either end up proof reading the scanned document or just typing it by hand. the letter "O" is almost always translated by the OCR as a "0" or a zero is translated as an "O". it can be pretty frustrating.
- iLoch 12y ago
  I wish there was a library that allowed you to input expected data (ex: we expect to see zeros 20% more often then the letter O), then the interpreter could compare against that fact and determine the likelihood of it being each letter. As it stands for most libraries that I'm aware of, you just have to get the data and run your own tests to see whether it should be an O or a zero.
- Zergy 12y ago
  I used the ABBYY orc engine to digitize printed documents (idk why they couldn't just keep around the file used to print) and it was quite accurate. At worst one out of a couple hundred would have enough issues where readability was an issue.
  - gfosco 12y ago
    Similar experience here, when building a mobile app that did OCR + translations.. As long as the source image was in decent shape, ABBYY did very well. It's also incredibly expensive.

systematical 12y ago

Hand writing my name Chris was difficult for it to pick up. It kept thinking my "C" was an "L" and putting spaces in between letters. Also determined my "S" was an underscore. Still pretty cool. Thanks!

alistairjcbrown 12y ago
Looks like underscore character ("_") is used when the letter can't be determined - so in fact it had no idea what your "S" was ^_^

alistairjcbrown 12y ago

Interesting - I've had the Project Naptha (http://projectnaptha.com/ http://projectnaptha.com/) Chrome extension installed without really looking under the hood. Turns out it has Ocrad.js and Tesseract as two engine options - it uses them to automaticaly convert images on the page to selectable text.

paulirish 12y ago
Yup! And Naptha and Ocrad.js are both authored by antimatter15.

bignis 12y ago

It demos well, but then I tried a simple test - a photograph of some text (http://imgur.com/TCnGlZG http://imgur.com/TCnGlZG), Ocrad.js utterly failed at it, almost all letters were incorrect.

fnordsensei 12y ago

Love the idea of it. However, I threw some random Swedish at it, and it didn't fare too well. http://imgur.com/nZLtoj5 http://imgur.com/nZLtoj5 Kudos for the effort though!

mlinksva 12y ago

It'd be nice to be able to invoke this from within PDF.js.