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Comment by deedubaya | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to hijack, but what about the best OCR service? I'd much rather farm the OCR work out to another service than trying to do it myself.

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I bought ABBYY FineReader for Mac for abut $99. I find it to be pretty amazing. My new scanner also came with it and I generally expect it to do a reasonable text translation of whatever I throw it, whether it be newsprint articles or crumpled receipts.

If you need to do OCR that also preserves table structure -- which is what I bought FineReader for in the first place, I don't think there's any open source alternative, and FineReader does a very capable job.

Here's an example of FineReader in action: OCRing the docs released by the FBI on Clinton's email system. I've also included the pdftotext output showing how FineReader's text conversion also attempts to preserve the physical layout of the text characters:

https://github.com/dannguyen/clinton-hillary-email-fbi-inves...

They also have a Linux CLI for servers, it seems to be licensed by annual page volume, https://www.abbyy.com/ocr-sdk-linux & http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:pricing

thank you, I'll check it out. Know this company very well, we originated from the same university, but I've completely forgotten to check their new products now. Thanks.

Oh. For 500.000 pages per year the ask >5k euro... No way. I need to process ~50M images right now, and then ~50k every day.

Make them an offer. I can almost guarantee there's room for negotiation.

Try OCR.space - it is 10$ per 100,000 (and probably even less for your volume)

Thanks for the example. That's probably the best advertisement. I have a TON of physical notes that I want to turn into text. I know people use Evernote but I never trusted them. I prefer to keep it in-house and this is a solid solution. THANKS!

That's pretty good! How does it do with your handwriting?

I used to use Evernote quite heavily and I've never been able to replace their excellent OCR. I would search for some text and was always blown away when it would find a photo of a whiteboard or a sketch of mine.

Any idea what Evernote uses?

Good question..

Since both ABBYY and Evernote were founded by Russians, I bet Evernote uses FineReader.

It is not the case. Evernote was created by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Pachikov who also founded Parascript company http://www.parascript.com, which was doing OCR long before Abbyy and is mostly specialized on handwriting. So both technologies are from Russia, but teams are independent.

I'm not going to embarrass myself by showing my handwriting. So here's how it does on 3 famous handwritten letters (not well) https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/50dcb5a8f4230e7a8a40bfe2d0...

I use ABBYY for Linux: http://www.ocr4linux.com/

Everything about it sucks, cost, anual page limit license, I can only run it as root for some reason, but the OCR quality is superb.

here's the scripts I use if it's useful: https://github.com/cove/scanbd

Google Cloud Platform has an API for it: https://cloud.google.com/vision/

I have to say, this was the most accurate and quickest method I had tried when it came to OCR.

Here's an example (with Python code) of how it performs on street sign data:

https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/a0b69c84ebc00c54c94d

Unfortunately, it doesn't do well on large chunks of text if you're trying to OCR a scanned document.

Same result here. Google OCR shines on short text inside images such a streets signs.It works also well on mangas :-)

The Ocr.space OCR Api works well and has a very generous free tier. And then there is also the Google Vision API, which includes good but basic OCR (but does not support coordinates, just returns plain text)

I just tried two pictures with VINs in them. Both of them were successfully parsed by Google Vision, but OCR.space just errored out. It was not an encouraging result.

yeah.. Google OCR is better for more challenging tasks, but in my case (OCR on Screenshots and PDF OCR in Chinese and English) the ocr.space soluton works just fine, so I picked it as the most economical solution.

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