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Comment by physcab | Hacker News Reader

I tried using Tesseract and could not get it to work reliably. I tried a bunch of different pre-processing techniques and it turned into a very frustrating experience.

When I compared Tesseract to Abbyy, the difference was night and day. Abbyy straight out of the box got me 80%-90% accuracy of my text. Tesseract got around 75% at best with several layers deep of image pre-processing.

I know you said open source, and just wanted to say, I went down that path too and discovered in my case, proprietary software really was worth the price.

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A counter anecdote, I've used Tesseract for a largish project and it's worked wonderfully. Typically, on a full page of text, there'd be one or two minor errors, easily 99% accuracy. Irritatingly for me, but also impressively, it seemed to detect ligatures correctly (it used the unicode 'ﬂ' instead of 'fl').

That unicode ligature would be an interesting surprise if you wanted plain text.

Exact same experience here. Omnipage also produced excellent results.

Finereader engine Abbyy for Linux looks fine, but I can't find price data, is it <10k/year? One time license?

Abbyy, and most good commercial OCR, charge a runtime royalty based on the number of cores you are deploying to. Depends on volume.

And they limit you to scanned pages per year on the corporate/server offerings. Doubly-so for all their dev/api license options.

And the kicker: You can't buy those licenses from them directly. They put you in contact with some randome monopoly local distributor that usually has mandatory "training" charges.

Messy, and I'm planning on staying away from that with a ten-foot pole.

If there is no opensource/free software with the same quality, what then? What are you using as an OCR server side system on Linux? I'm sure not good enough to write my own OCR better than Abbyy.

As the others in the thread have mentioned. Constrain your problem as a computer-vision one to segment nice pieces of work for Tesseract. Along with some nice training data, and possibly human validation if that's feasible.

All do-able within Linux.

As the parent of this comment thread mentions, Tesseract is not very great for mass usage due to the error rate with Abbyy much better. I would be interested in experience not opinion.

Can you point me to some prices, per core / core-year?

I believe you need to call them.

This is from years ago, but it was $4,900 for an SDK license for development and testing, and then the runtime licenses that you actually deploy are negotiable depending on pages/month, cores, languages, and other options. I think if you're just buying 1 runtime license they try to make it so it is around $5K so the total deal size is $10K. But they are negotiable. Maybe mention if you're a startup.

They also sold Recognition Server which has fewer options to integrate with programmatically (it was only 'hot folders' at the time), and I think only runs on Windows, but costs less.

And their mobile OCR which is lightweight, designed to run on smartphones, they worked out deals where they get a percentage of revenue.

Where do you see this? I'm actually thinking of buying the software right now and I explicitly asked what other charges are there besides the initial fee (~$100) and they said there wasn't any. Am I not asking the right question?

At my previous job we used them (on Windows).

I seriously doubt that it's just $100 -- but, I guess if you are making an application that you are just going to run yourself on a single machine, it would not cost much. The costs tended to increase with the number of computers you were deploying to. Or perhaps we used something more capable (does that come with all languages -- including Chinese/Japanese/Korean and RTL languages).

Aye, I just had a back and forth with a tech rep there. They advised me at the end to contact sales to 100% understand, but the gist I got was that the FineReader Engine is $100 and it can do anything the SDK can do, but you have limited functionality in how it can operate with other programs (on Mac, all you get is Automator) and it can't be scaled to many cores. If you don't need that, then it seems to be a pretty damn good deal. Will talk to the sales rep first though.

What kind of problem were you dealing with? Were you bumping up against any constraints?

We were an image-processing SDK with OCR add-ons which were us reselling 3rd party SDKs with integration to our codecs and the processing code. It needed to be completely general purpose use in any .NET program (web, service, desktop, console, etc) since we didn't really want to get into usage with our customers (we had no royalties or usage restrictions on our part).

I think we opted for the customer actually obtaining their Abbyy license from Abbyy in the end because of the licensing mis-match. We sold just the wrapper.

Our parent company was a big user of Abbyy, and I think had a totally custom deal. They needed it for all of the language support and similarly wanted the full power to run it at high-speed and inside of .NET programs.

You can get Abbyy OCR Cloud SDK and its $0.10 per page (goes down with volume).

http://ocrsdk.com/plans-and-pricing/

Thx!

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