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Does anyone know of some good open sourced projects for OCR? Tesseract always seems to be the default, and then it seems Google cloud, and other services are miles ahead. However, for those who don't want to rely on the big tech companies, are there any comparable alternatives?

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In terms of setup and ease of use jaided OCR[1] is the best one I have used out there. I can't stress how many times I tried other alternative (tesseract, paddle OCR) out there and kept going back to use their OCR library. Mainly because it supports a large variety of languages out of the box while provide nice results.

Disclaimer : I am not affiliated to jaidedAI, just a satisfied user.

[1] https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR

I recently came across CRAFT wich appears to have come out of the ICDAR2017 Robust reading challenge.

It performed better than expected. I only tested a few images so please don't take my word for it.

That led me to PaddleOCR. There is still plenty of room for improvement but I found it way more convenient to use for my purposes than messing with Tesseract.

https://github.com/clovaai/CRAFT-pytorch

https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

I just tried it at [1] on the text of your comment and it replied with an empty result.

Perhaps I should try more examples, but it doesn't look like it's ready yet.

[1] https://www.paddlepaddle.org.cn/hub/scene/ocr

Thanks for the suggestions - I've tried Paddle before, however was looking for a local only version - seems like Paddle uses external sources (cn) for some of its OCR features, and unfortunately that won't work in this line of work

There is easyocr which is good enough but lacks maturity (it was acknowledged at some point by Yann LeCun). The code base isn't ideal. I'm currently working on my own custom OCR since easyocr isn't perfect at detecting emails for example Www.ismaj@gmail ;com

Did anything eventually happen with Ocropus?

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