Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine • Hacker News Board

Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine

#1

Post by kiyanwang » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 11:06 AM UTC

Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine
tesseract.projectnaptha.com

Re: Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine

#2

Post by jtdev » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 12:56 PM UTC

Congrats! Why would one create such a project with JS given all of the languages available to them?

Re: Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine

#3

Post by peteretep » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

> Tesseract.js wraps an emscripten port of the Tesseract OCR Engine

Calling this “pure JavaScript” seems misleading

Re: Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine

#4

Post by Tajnymag » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

jtdev wrote: post #2

Congrats! Why would one create such a project with JS given all of the languages available to them?

Client-side web apps. With today's smartphones, it does make sense to not do everything solely on the server side.

Theretically, cross platform support would be another possibility. But one could argue native C code could be bundled as well, albeit with separate integration being needed. (Android and iOS do support such extensions).

Re: Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine

#5

Post by mkl » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

jtdev wrote: post #2

Congrats! Why would one create such a project with JS given all of the languages available to them?

It's mostly not JavaScript, since it uses the emscripten port of the Tesseract OCR Engine, and if you want to do things in the browser, JavaScript has to be involved.

Re: Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine

#6

Post by zikero » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

Nice stuff!

I found an error in the chinese demo, with the example you provided (4th character wasn't the same). I know no OCR is perfect, but IMHO at least your own demo should be free of errors.

Re: Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine

#7

Post by mkl » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

The total size of the download seems to be 3-4MB (based on https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js/blob/master/docs/loca...), which is actually less than I expected.

Re: Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine

#8

Post by mkl » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #3

> Tesseract.js wraps an emscripten port of the Tesseract OCR Engine Calling this “pure JavaScript” seems misleading

Yes, it's kind of weird, since there's no benefit to claiming false things like "Tesseract.js is a pure Javascript port [...]". Say it's WASM, since people associate that with speed and newness (and heavyweight dependencies, but there's no hiding that).

Re: Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine

#9

Post by mkl » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

zikero wrote: post #6

Nice stuff! I found an error in the chinese demo, with the example you provided (4th character wasn't the same). I know no OCR is perfect, but IMHO at least your own demo should be free of errors.

There's one in the English demo too: "hail!" -> "haill". They're both pretty bad images though. In practice I've found (command line) Tesseract very accurate on 300dpi scans of printed documents, with colour/greyscale, not binary.

Re: Tesseract.js – A Javascript port of the Tesseract OCR engine

#10

Post by villgax » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

Tesseract is decent for scanned imagery, whether in actual images or in PDFs but definitely not for text in the wild.