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Comment by kayhi | Hacker News Reader

What software is the current leader in OCR solutions?

Look into various paid offerings on the cloud. Azure, GCP, AWS all have OCR-as-a-service they outperforms local software.

For anything long term and high volume it's far cheaper to use open source solutions and hire a manual review team in the developing world where English is a common second language. Unless you are comfortable with the high rate of errors there's still a need for review.

For small one-off tasks the cloud solutions do fine.

Be it handwritten or printed text, by far, Microsoft's Azure OCR is best in recognizing text.

Abbyy FineReader is generally better than any of the major cloud vendors in my testing.

See also this previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20470439

Thanks, I had looked that over but thought things may have changed in the last year.

Also quite expensive since it is at the head of the pack IIRC. There is probably some value in making a competitor with new deep learning techniques provided you have a sufficiently diverse training set. It would take years to build tho.

I've done some work on deep learning approaches - specifically table extraction.

It's not at all obvious how to make this work - there is a lot of human judgement involved in judging what a header is vs what are values, especially with merged header column/row columns.

Yeah I remember Abbyy also has an interface to define layouts for this kind of problem. I.E., this thing is a table and here are the headers etc.

Sorry, I was not trying to say deep learning would be a substitute for all such issues, just that new approaches may help a smaller team build those tools more efficiently.

I don't know if Abbyy combines its layout tool with training a model for customers, but it seems like a reasonable thing to build and expose.

For one-offs, you can use SensusAccess. I've found their quality to be pretty good.

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