I'm working on these problems for applications in the financial industry right now. We are building some interesting technologies and have quite a bit of funding from top VCs. We are looking to hire people who know this problem cold. Let me know if you're curious.
nate@qualia-app com
Ask HN: Open source OCR library?
41–50 of 104 posts
Re: Ask HN: Open source OCR library?
#42Tesseract with ccv for SWT works but is a bit of a slow dog. Anyone used deep learning (caffe maybe?) for OCR?
Thought I'd reply on my own comment.
Caffe has been used for handwriting, seems like OCR of typefaces would work just the same with a typeface dataset.
https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/tree/dev/examples/mnist
Here is the only other OCR example with caffe i could find:
Re: Ask HN: Open source OCR library?
#43Re: Ask HN: Open source OCR library?
#44I tried using Tesseract and could not get it to work reliably. I tried a bunch of different pre-processing techniques and it turned into a very frustrating experience. When I compared Tesseract to Abbyy, the difference was night and day. Abbyy straight out of the box got me 80%-90% accuracy of my text. Tesseract got around 75% at best with several layers deep of image pre-processing. I know you said open source, and…
Finereader engine Abbyy for Linux looks fine, but I can't find price data, is it <10k/year? One time license?
Abbyy, and most good commercial OCR, charge a runtime royalty based on the number of cores you are deploying to. Depends on volume.
Re: Ask HN: Open source OCR library?
#45A Guide on OCR with tesseract 3.03:
http://www.joyofdata.de/blog/a-guide-on-ocr-with-tesseract-3... 03/
Re: Ask HN: Open source OCR library?
#46Re: Ask HN: Open source OCR library?
#47I used Tesseract and OpenCV to process Words With Friends tiles.
I'm just starting out on something similar (OCR'ing letters from a word game), so would also love to here more about the process you're using with Tesseract and OpenCV.
Re: Ask HN: Open source OCR library?
#48I used Tesseract and OpenCV to process Words With Friends tiles.
Yeah, I used Tesseract to solve Countdown puzzles on Android, code here: https://github.com/danielsamuels/countdown/blob/master/scree...
Re: Ask HN: Open source OCR library?
#49I tried using Tesseract and could not get it to work reliably. I tried a bunch of different pre-processing techniques and it turned into a very frustrating experience. When I compared Tesseract to Abbyy, the difference was night and day. Abbyy straight out of the box got me 80%-90% accuracy of my text. Tesseract got around 75% at best with several layers deep of image pre-processing. I know you said open source, and…
A counter anecdote, I've used Tesseract for a largish project and it's worked wonderfully. Typically, on a full page of text, there'd be one or two minor errors, easily 99% accuracy. Irritatingly for me, but also impressively, it seemed to detect ligatures correctly (it used the unicode 'fl' instead of 'fl').
Re: Ask HN: Open source OCR library?
#50We've had great success with CCV's SWT to indentify text zones and Tesseract to extract it.