this is great, been waiting for a newer machine learning based library as an option to Tesseract.
a bit out of topic - but does anyone happen to know if there is an open-source, new school OCR library for music notation?
EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages
#22From what I can tell (without having read the research papers) it looks like this is just an easy to use package for sparse scene text extraction. It seems to do okay if the scene has sparse text but it falls down for dense text detection. The results are going to be pretty bad if you try and do a task like "extract transactions from a picture of a receipt." Here's an example of input you might get for a production a…
I'm just happy to see some advancement in open source OCR for Python. Last time I had a Python project that needed OCR, I found that the open-source options were surprisingly limited, and it required some effort to achieve consistently good results even with relatively clean inputs.
Honestly I was kind of surprised that good basic OCR isn't a totally solved issue with an ecosystem of fully open-source solutions by now.
Re: EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages
#23This is something that I find really interesting. Open-source OCR is lagging behing commercial applications and seeing someone trying ideas is always beneficial. Kudos!!
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Re: EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages
#24From what I can tell (without having read the research papers) it looks like this is just an easy to use package for sparse scene text extraction. It seems to do okay if the scene has sparse text but it falls down for dense text detection. The results are going to be pretty bad if you try and do a task like "extract transactions from a picture of a receipt." Here's an example of input you might get for a production a…
I'm just happy to see some advancement in open source OCR for Python. Last time I had a Python project that needed OCR, I found that the open-source options were surprisingly limited, and it required some effort to achieve consistently good results even with relatively clean inputs. Honestly I was kind of surprised that good basic OCR isn't a totally solved issue with an ecosystem of fully open-source solutions by no…
From my experience the algorithms & implementations seem to be pretty good but the caveat is that you the developer need to be aware of all the different approaches and when it is appropriate to apply them. There just doesn't seem to be a good general purpose library that stitches them all together and knows when to use which approach based analyzing the image.
Re: EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages
#25From what I can tell (without having read the research papers) it looks like this is just an easy to use package for sparse scene text extraction. It seems to do okay if the scene has sparse text but it falls down for dense text detection. The results are going to be pretty bad if you try and do a task like "extract transactions from a picture of a receipt." Here's an example of input you might get for a production a…
I'm just happy to see some advancement in open source OCR for Python. Last time I had a Python project that needed OCR, I found that the open-source options were surprisingly limited, and it required some effort to achieve consistently good results even with relatively clean inputs. Honestly I was kind of surprised that good basic OCR isn't a totally solved issue with an ecosystem of fully open-source solutions by no…
> Honestly I was kind of surprised that good basic OCR isn't a totally solved issue with an ecosystem of fully open-source solutions by now.
Yes! Can anyone comment on why this is the case, since OCR is proclaimed to be a solved problem?
I've always wondered why Google Lens works "out of the box" and shows great accuracy on extracting text from images taken using a phone camera, but open-source OCR software (Tesseract, Ocropy etc.) needs a lot of tweaking to extract text from standard documents with standard fonts, even after heavily pre-processing the images.
PS: Has Google released any paper on Google Lens?
Re: EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
So your point is that this library is not a magic unicorn that solves all problems related to OCR and natural language processing?
Try reading the post. There’s a lot more there but the gist is that this is optimized for a different set of OCR uses and not the more typical scan a book/receipt cases.
This is a fair point. I think my criticism more generally is that they position it as easy to use but its still just another library for a subset of OCR problems: sparse text extraction from a scene. As I said in a sibling post there doesn't seem to be a library that stitches together OCR approaches for all the different use cases and chooses an approach based on analyzing the image itself. That would be truly easy to use.
Re: EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages
#27Compared to ABBYY, how does this thing fare? I don't have the time right now to do this test and if anyone here did it I'd be thankful to share.
Re: EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tesseract isn't very accurate, especially with text in photos. It works OK for scanned documents, but that's about it.
Tesseract can be very accurate (>99%), especially when you train it for your particular data set. This does involve creating your own labeled data. I got this 99% accuracy by performing incremental training using latest Manheim model as a base. I added about 20k lines which is not really that much. https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki The hard part was crowd sourcing those 20k lines :) Tesseract might not…
Care to share resources/lessons learned for training tesseract with custom data? I'm using it for a side project and would love to hear about your insights.
Re: EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just happy to see some advancement in open source OCR for Python. Last time I had a Python project that needed OCR, I found that the open-source options were surprisingly limited, and it required some effort to achieve consistently good results even with relatively clean inputs. Honestly I was kind of surprised that good basic OCR isn't a totally solved issue with an ecosystem of fully open-source solutions by no…
> Honestly I was kind of surprised that good basic OCR isn't a totally solved issue with an ecosystem of fully open-source solutions by now. Yes! Can anyone comment on why this is the case, since OCR is proclaimed to be a solved problem? I've always wondered why Google Lens works "out of the box" and shows great accuracy on extracting text from images taken using a phone camera, but open-source OCR software (Tesserac…
I've been wondering this ever since I used Lens. My hobby applications doing OCR always fall way short of Len's magic.
Re: EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages
#30I've recently become interested in OCR due to using Kaku on Android for trying to get better at reading Japanese. So thanks Hacker News for showing me a new version. I'd love any comments about other resources that may be good for learning. Especially because for funsies I'd like to try and develop my own.
For learning, you could try training yourself on datasets for handwritten character recognition: http://etlcdb.db.aist.go.jp/