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Microsoft OCR Library for Windows Runtime

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Microsoft OCR Library for Windows Runtime

#41

Post by Spearchucker »

NetMonkey wrote: post #39
pjmlp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is Windows Runtime and am I just supposed to know this? If you subscribe to MSDN like any Windows developer, this has been explained multiple times in the last two years. Just for the clueless ones. Windows Runtime is an evolution of COM, based on the ideas that were on the genesis of .NET. Namely Ext-VOS. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2012/07/05/more-c-net-... So a native version of .NET, so to speak.…

It was 7 years from XP to Vista - and 9 years to Windows 7. Now it has just been 5 years since Windows 7 and apparently it's already completely outdated. It's only 2 years since Windows 8.0, and it's already out! If this is the way Microsoft is going, then it's a huge change for anybody dealing with enterprise. I used to be able to develop on the same system using the same techs as my customers - now I may sit on Win…

Didn't down-vote you, but I can guess why someone else might've.

Up until this post you didn't have it (the Microsoft OCR library) anywhere. You're still free as ever to develop using all the non-RT technologies (Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, WF, WCF and so on). All of it's officially supported.

And all said and done, Microsoft is doing no more or less than any other tech company. They release new stuff. And sometimes a new release is constrained in some way, like when an iPhone app is released by some startup that doesn't bother with an Android or Windows Phone equivalent. They may come eventually, or not...

Re: Microsoft OCR Library for Windows Runtime

#42

Post by RyJones »

NetMonkey wrote: post #25
danbruc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MSDN documentation for the classes [1] clearly states the supported platforms. Admittedly the restriction to store apps is missing on the page for the namespace [2]. Minimum supported client Windows 8.1 [Windows Store apps only] Minimum supported server Windows Server 2012 R2 [Windows Store apps only] Minimum supported phone Windows Phone 8 [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/wi... [2] h…

Ah, don't know how I missed that. Thanks. Crazy that it's limited to 8.1, and not even working on 8.0. I really wonder if there is a valid technical reason, or they just use it to push upgrades.

8.0 is deprecated, 8.1 has replaced it.

Re: Microsoft OCR Library for Windows Runtime

#43

Post by maxxxxx »

NetMonkey wrote: post #25
danbruc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MSDN documentation for the classes [1] clearly states the supported platforms. Admittedly the restriction to store apps is missing on the page for the namespace [2]. Minimum supported client Windows 8.1 [Windows Store apps only] Minimum supported server Windows Server 2012 R2 [Windows Store apps only] Minimum supported phone Windows Phone 8 [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/wi... [2] h…

Ah, don't know how I missed that. Thanks. Crazy that it's limited to 8.1, and not even working on 8.0. I really wonder if there is a valid technical reason, or they just use it to push upgrades.

I can't imagine there being a technical reason. OCR is almost purely algorithmic and it shouldn't depend much on the OS.

Re: Microsoft OCR Library for Windows Runtime

#45

Post by Norm-- »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #15
reallycurious wrote: post #3

is this better than the terrassect OCR?

Thats the big question. Tesseract is pretty good, though quite slow I must say.

It depends on what is being scanned. Say you have a perfectly formatted image, directly taken from a scanner, it's a pretty darn quick process.

But from my experience, what adds to the slowness is pre-processing the image to make it suitable for OCR, especially tesseract. I still haven't found the magic combination of filters because every image is different, especially if your source them from users camera phones.

Re: Microsoft OCR Library for Windows Runtime

#46

Post by Norm-- »

So from reading the list of reasons for inaccurate results, it sounds like this library is totally useless for images taken with mobile phones, yet it is only allowed to run on mobile ;)

Now I would be more interested in an image correction library

".... Blurry images Handwritten or cursive text Artistic font styles Small text size (less than 15 pixels for Western languages, or less than 20 pixels for East Asian languages) Complex backgrounds Shadows or glare over text Perspective distortion Oversized or dropped capital letters at the beginnings of words Subscript, superscript, or strikethrough text"

Re: Microsoft OCR Library for Windows Runtime

#47

Post by mdaniel »

On http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows... they mention the supported languages and their statuses, but Korean is only "Good".

I freely admit that I do not speak Korean, but if one compares "Chinese Simplified" characters (listed as "Very good") with those in the Korean alphabet, I am surprised those two entries aren't transposed.

Is there something that makes recognizing Korean harder than Chinese Simplified, or was that just a product management decision?

Re: Microsoft OCR Library for Windows Runtime

#48

Post by steeve »

beagle3 wrote: post #33
steeve wrote: post #8

We had great results using tesseract-ocr[1] with SWT (state of the art text detection algorithm, via libccv[2]) on Linux. You can use our python bindings for both[3,4], although they might be slightly outdated: [1] https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ [2] http://libccv.org/doc/doc-swt/ [3] https://github.com/veezio/pytesseract [4] https://github.com/veezio/pyccv

What did you use to generate pyccv? (It looks automatically generated) Does it still work with an up-to-date ccv?

This method: http://www.kaij.org/blog/?p=98

Although SWIG might work better now.

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