Show HN: BetterOCR combines and corrects multiple OCR engines with an LLM | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: BetterOCR combines and corrects multiple OCR engines with an LLM

github.com

63 pointsjunhoyeo20 comments

Wow, this is just up my alley. I started a side project recently using Tesseract to read book spines for inventory purposes and hooked it up to ChatGPT to clean up the text, having it "fill in the blanks" so to speak. I'll definitely give this a go, having using two OCR engines I should get better results.

Any plans to add other OCR engines?

Yup! But I'm still exploring options. (any recommendations would be welcomed!) Here are some candidates I'm considering:

- https://github.com/mindee/doctr

- https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmocr

- https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR (honestly I don't know Mandarin so I'm a bit stuck)

- https://github.com/clovaai/donut -- While it's primarily an "OCR-free document understanding transformer," I think it's worth experimenting with. Think I can sort this out by letting the LLM reason through it multiple times (although this will impact performance)

- yesterday got a suggestion to consider https://github.com/kakaobrain/pororo -- don't think development is still active but the results are pretty great on Korean text

I’ve been looking for an OCR engine and hoped that using LLMs would improve their output.

Looks great! I’ll give it a go.

Super -- I'm thrilled you enjoyed it!

Awesome - I'm a dabbler, but any thoughts on best engines for PDF tables? I've got tons of PDFs with similar tables embedded deep in them, but all formatted slightly differently. Seems like it should be easy....but nope!

Are you able to highlight the text on the PDF? If so, I highly recommend PDF2TXT to extract text from PDFs. Would require some parsing work on your part to convert it back to a table, but zero chance of error from inference since it’s using text extraction.

If you can’t highlight the text, it won’t work.

You can make any PDFs 'highlightable' with GitHub.com/ocrmypdf

It’s not perfect, unfortunately.

Thanks!

PDF -> Markdown looks like a pretty great use case

Just added box detection support -- maybe I'll start from here https://github.com/junhoyeo/BetterOCR#-box-detection

Tabula.

It does what you are looking for

I use popper pdftotext -layout flag, which preserves the shape of the tables. Gpt can then fix them up into whatever format.

Cool. Is there also a library which can be combined with this to automatically translate languages except some I understand (which I would specify as a list of ISO codes)?

Interesting, will see how it performs

Thanks!

Is the OpenAI key paid-only?

Similarly, is there any half decent general LLM that can run on consumer hardware?

Thinking to add LLaMA or other OSS LLM models soon

Please consider LLaMA.cpp (https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp), which supports a lot of models and doesn't need an expensive GPU.

Cool!

My pleasure

Reply on news.ycombinator.com