[HN Gopher] Rescribe: A high quality OCR tool for historic books
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       Rescribe: A high quality OCR tool for historic books
        
       Author : dbuxton
       Score  : 68 points
       Date   : 2021-11-24 08:32 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (rescribe.xyz)
 (TXT) w3m dump (rescribe.xyz)
        
       | thaumasiotes wrote:
       | I have the Kindle version of _The Seleucid Royal Economy_ which
       | for obvious reasons includes Greek text.
       | 
       | It's been OCRed, and the Greek has been mangled beyond belief.
       | Sometimes the OCR will split a single character.
       | 
       | No real point to the story, but it feels relevant here. I see
       | Rescribe has already encountered the problem: "In the second step
       | we run the OCR on the preprocessed files, using our specifically
       | trained packages and adapting language and character settings to
       | the document at hand."
       | 
       | (I'm only complaining to a very small degree. Having a low-
       | quality OCRed ebook available is much better than having no ebook
       | available. And what is normally displayed is the image of the
       | text, not the OCRed nonsense, so it doesn't matter that the Greek
       | has been transformed into gibberish until you encounter the odd
       | mid-character word break.)
        
       | raybb wrote:
       | I think the folks at OpenLibrary.org would benefit from something
       | like this.
        
         | wumpus wrote:
         | PGDP is the project that's doing high quality book
         | transcriptions. OpenLibrary is a distribution mechanism.
        
       | IshKebab wrote:
       | Is Tesseract any good yet? Last I heard they were experimenting
       | with deep learning based recognition but before that I've tried
       | it and it didn't work at all. Kind of Pocketsphinx levels of
       | rubbish.
        
         | david_allison wrote:
         | In my experience, you need to pre-process the text before
         | Tesseract gives reasonable results.
         | 
         | I'd wager 90%+ accuracy after pre-processing a book with
         | ScanTailor.
         | 
         | Accuracy falls off a cliff if the text is handwritten rather
         | than using a printing press, but it's still useful to get a
         | side-by-side editable OCR <-> image.
        
         | xipho wrote:
         | "Is it good yet" is trolling. If you reference a benchmark,
         | gold-standard etc. and list specific use case failures you
         | might be taken more seriously.
         | 
         | It has a massive impact in various scientific fields that
         | require "good enough", which all things considered is magic in
         | many cases. I don't know of its use outside this area, but I
         | suspect that if it has had the level of impact inside science
         | it has had a huge impact in the broader world.
        
           | cinntaile wrote:
           | I think it's a valid criticism of Tesseract. It's very
           | dependent on the input and if they have managed to improve
           | this then it would hugely increase its usefulness.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | acdha wrote:
         | It's been good for a long time with an important caveat:
         | Tesseract historically needed preprocessing if your scans were
         | skewed or warped. Years back I talked with someone from Google
         | who said that they'd focused their efforts on the preprocessor
         | side deskewing and identifying structure like columns, but not
         | extensively modifying Tesseract itself.
        
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