[HN Gopher] Our search for the best OCR tool (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Our search for the best OCR tool (2019)
Author : longrod
Score : 45 points
Date : 2022-07-11 08:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (source.opennews.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (source.opennews.org)
| pronoiac wrote:
| I went looking for a similar comparison a few months ago, and saw
| this: https://research.aimultiple.com/ocr-accuracy/ It compared
| ABBYY FineReader 15, Amazon Textract, Google Cloud Platform
| Vision API, Microsoft Azure Computer Vision API, and Tesseract
| OCR Engine. I ended up using OCRmyPDF / Tesseract out of
| convenience, but doing a second pass with Google Cloud Vision,
| AWS Textract, or Abbyy is somewhere on my to-do list.
| ce4 wrote:
| I went with this instead of OCRmyPDF:
|
| https://gitlab.com/kebekus/scantools/
| pronoiac wrote:
| I hadn't heard of scantools! Do you have anything to say
| about it? Why you chose it, features, etc.?
| nicodjimenez wrote:
| For STEM applications, nothing beats Mathpix OCR.
|
| FB Research uses it, London Stock Exchange uses it, Chegg uses it
| (in fact even recently transitioned to Mathpix OCR from Google
| vision), and many, many other companies and individuals.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm the founder.
| nammi wrote:
| Does anyone use OCR to convert BluRay subtitles (.sup) to
| plaintext .srt files? I've used tools like SupRip and BDSup2Sub,
| but they've all required pretty significant cleanup afterwards.
| 'l', '1', and 'I' especially get mixed up a lot
| leokennis wrote:
| Assuming all these subtitles (at least per movie) are in the
| same font, isn't it enough to tell/correct it once that "this
| is an I" and "this is a 1", and then it knows for the entire
| .sup?
| nammi wrote:
| That's what I figured, but in practice I wasn't able to do
| that without having to manually enter most subtitles. The
| tools are relatively old, so I was hoping something newer had
| figured it out
| longrod wrote:
| Found this comparison while researching OCR. It doesn't have the
| latest libraries like PaddleOCR but the performance of different
| OCR libraries is still quite apparent.
| ducktective wrote:
| I think among the easy-to-use FOSS CLI tools, the competition
| is between Tesseract and PaddlePaddle. I'm interested to know
| how they fare against each other. I'm mainly interested in
| using them in `ocrmypdf`
| mdp2021 wrote:
| If you prefer not to install it at this stage, there is a
| chance that PaddlePaddle has a web interface - maybe you
| could try and see the results against a document also
| processed with Tesseract (also those in the article, if the
| scans are available).
| bufo wrote:
| The iOS / Apple OCR Swift API is drastically better than the ones
| I've tried online (eg. Microsoft) or the open source ones
| (Tesseract). Highly recommended. You can get fairly high
| throughput with M1 chips. The CNN is accelerated by the neural
| chip and the language model is accelerated by the GPU.
| simonw wrote:
| I had spectacular results from AWS Textract recently - which when
| this article was written (2019) wasn't yet openly available.
|
| I fed it thousands of pages of historical scanned documents -
| including handwritten journals from the 1800s - and it could read
| them better than I could!
|
| I built a tool to use it (since running it in bulk against PDFs
| in a bucket took a few too many steps) and wrote about my
| experiences with it here:
| https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jun/30/s3-ocr/
| amelius wrote:
| Great that it works for you, but I'm not too happy about big
| companies assuming that my product is connected to the
| internet.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| What I really want is something with a similar set of convenient
| APIs and CLIs like ocrmypdf [1] that supports some of the more
| recent ML based systems. Ocrmypdf has really good ergonomics for
| me in terms of ease of scripting.
|
| Something like DocTR [2] with the same api would be fantastic.
|
| [1] https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
|
| [2] https://mindee.github.io/doctr/
| albatrosstrophy wrote:
| How about foreign languages? I've never had one good enough for
| Arabic. 3 years ago when needed it for a project, no OCR I found
| could read a properly scanned Arabic page. Had to go on Fiverr
| and paid a transcriber instead.
| Rochus wrote:
| Interesting report. As far as I understand in total no of the
| systems was really better in all categories (or did I miss
| something?). A summary would have been helpful. Also it would be
| interesting whether the neural network based or the traditional
| Tesseract engine was used. I did similar experiments for a
| project six years ago and ended up with Tesseract and a custom
| traineddata file.
| iisan7 wrote:
| What do folks think about these document types as a corpus for
| comparing tools? It's missing images and handwriting samples, but
| those types of documents might just be too variable to make
| conclusions about.
|
| I remember Baidu's OCR giving excellent English results, but it
| looks like their API is deprecated now. Out of curiousity, I ran
| these samples through easyOCR by JaidedAI. Results at
| https://pastebin.com/RjzVd5Sf.
| sgc wrote:
| I OCR books, so they are not a good sample. I would want to
| compare at least 10 pages per sample, with more typical
| problems such as skewed, rounded pages from photos, artifacts,
| damaged source pages (tears and creases) etc. They do reproduce
| some problems with changing fonts and layout, but a big piece
| of the puzzle is custom dictionaries and layout _training_. It
| 's fine for a once over, but not a deep dive.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-12 23:01 UTC)