Where Did Affordable OCR Go? 79
Goeland86 asks: "Has OCR (Optical Character Recognition) died down? Where have all the magical programs that translate your handwriting to office compatible files gone? Most of the windows programs nowadays are either expensive (ReadIris Pro 9 about $400) and not that many OSS projects for OCR have released a recent update (Kognition was last updated on July 17th 2003 according to Freshmeat). Has everyone already scanned/translated all of their paper files? Has OCR outlived its use, or is it just a fancy technology that hit a dead end in terms of the market? Have Slashdot readers used it? If so, are you still using it? If not, why?"
ocr and pdf (Score:3, Interesting)
ocr has to be babysat also. it is not 100% reliable like scanning to pdf is...
Re:ocr and pdf (Score:1)
-1 "Stream of Conciousness Frist Ps0t attempt"
What? Scanning to PDF != OCR. (Score:3, Informative)
It does not create text that you can search or highlight and copy with your mouse later on. It's just a picture.
Now, there is some nice scanning software out there that if you do select "text" mode when you scan to PDF, it does an OCR pass and sticks that in the PDF. But the cost of this software is usually hidden in the purchase of a high-end scanner or printer/fax combo t
Re:What? Scanning to PDF != OCR. (Score:1)
lower end ocr products. also in acrobat 4&5 (iirc).
Sometime you have to dig to find the feature though.
going from image ->ocr'd text -> text only pdf or text pdf with image snippets usually looks quite awful.
I+HT PDFs though will let you search for and highlight the text behind the image. It isn't perfectly accurate on placement but it's usually adequate.
You're quite right that most of the time 'scan to pdf' is just a bitmap. It's the usual default for
Re:ocr and pdf (Score:2)
I dunno (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
wow.
(yes it happens here)
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
http [slashdot.org]
might take a while... and I could use some help...
Re:I dunno (Score:1)
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
[hehehe... imagining the
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
'zilla went to some random search page, IE went to /. but firefox went to microsoft.com
if that's what you mean, it wasn't just you
Re:I dunno (Score:1)
Re:I dunno (Score:1)
I don't know, maybe for the same reason I don't use a speaker as a microphone. Sure, it can be done, but why would I want to do it when there are more specialized tools?
I too recently noticed... (Score:2)
I for one was encourged by the provious progress, but also fustrated by the still existant shortcomings of the software. Clear printed/type written documents still had a high rate of error (these were especially fustrating, was it un reasonable to expect letterquality reads to be nearly error free)...handwriting that was farly clear was getting there, but not quickly.
Perhaps the Voicedictation market has something to do with it, maybe the recognition rate and qualit
Re:I too recently noticed... (Score:2)
Assume you have documents you want to convert to digital text (and not just scan).
If you have money, then you either hire a temp to type them in for $100 a day, or contract them out to some poor schmuck in India to type them in for $5 a day.
If you don't have money, then your probably not what capitalists like to call a "customer."
Re:I too recently noticed... (Score:3, Interesting)
Side note: I remember a number of years ago, trying out OCR, and it turned out that I could type the page in sligtly faster than it could be scanned and recognized.
Re:I too recently noticed... (Score:2)
Re:I too recently noticed... (Score:2)
OmniPage Pro X (Score:1)
Re:OmniPage Pro X (Score:2)
Re:I too recently noticed... (Score:2)
I worked at a company that did this years ago. We started with OCR, but due to the error rate on even perfectly printed material, we dumped it and sent the material to india. It was pretty inexpensive - much less than our time correcting the OCR mistakes. We had triple entry which was still very cheap.
I could take something and print it in courier 16 point at 600dpi, scan it, and the OCR would still screw up about 1% of the time
Personally... (Score:3, Interesting)
At this point, OCR is a commodity. It's not really worth the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for research to get an extra 2% accuracy, so the technology is stagnant and the prices for standard, printed character OCR are dirt cheap.
With that being said, I see voice dictation as the next big thing. Voice recognition is where OCR was 10 years ago, still new, not many players in the market, and a lot of room for technological improvement. The accuracy isn't that great, even with extensive "training", and more and more, because of the need for archiving, data warehousing, captioning for accessibility (Section 508, W3C WAI and the like), captioning without training is going to become a shining goal within the next 10 years.
Re:Personally... (Score:2)
Re:Personally... (Score:2)
That has not been my experience. I have found the accuracy to be horrible - even on high-end systems. What we ended up doing for a domument management system is use the OCR for searching, and the raw image gets retrieved. 100% accuracy isn't very important then.
Re:Personally... (Score:1)
Where did useful OCR go? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm assuming people got sick of paying $39.95 for OCR software that didn't do jack squat, and was about as reliable as handing your documents to a spastic monkey. I'm also assuming software makers got sick of making $3 or $4 (or less) on each package, only to get a million tech support calls along the lines of "It doesn't work. I want my money back."
For $400, I'm guessing the software vendors can afford a small amount of support, and can expect the users to be willing to understand the limits of the software.
Blatant lack of research. (Score:5, Informative)
TextBridge, PaperPort, and a host of other entry level programs are available for windows under a $100 price point. Generally if you buy a decent scanner (ie not a $50 piece of crap), you'll get some software capable of doing OCR bundled for free.
Higher-end OCR packages with better accuracy, more features, etc. often cost quite a bit more. OmniPage Pro is a decent package for only slightly more than $100. ReadIris is a really good program, and is reportedly very quick in comparison to some of the others. I imagine this is the reason that it costs $400.
There are document management packages out there that have very good OCR integrated that cost a hell of a lot more than $400. Trust me, though, if you're looking at the time or cost of converting a few thousand pages of data into editible text documents, a program that costs even $400 should be a steal.
Why bother?? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the meantime, Harddrive capacity grew, and all of a sudden, the difference between a 4k text file and a 35k jpg became negligable. The only real bene
Re:Why bother?? (Score:1)
when I need to go back and find something I can't
grep through embedded TIFFs and JPEGs. So I tried
AdLib Express, and it works pretty damn well if
not expensive as hell. Plus, it embeds the OCR
results in the PDF so you can search within the
documents as well.
Re:Why bother?? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that jpegs can't be grepped like text. People don't just want to scan a stack of images, they want the data to have meaning. In some cases they even want to parse typed hospital forms into an xml format for example.
Re:Why bother?? (Score:2)
Also, how about other uses, like readers for the blind or visually impaired?
Re:Why bother?? (Score:1)
Re:Blatant lack of research. (Score:1)
You are, unwittingly perhaps, succumbing to one of the most persuasive, yet oldest sales tactics in the book. Just because one costs $400 and another costs $100, there is absolutely no reason to as
What a good question (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know what happened to OCR, but there's certainly still a need for it.
Re:What a good question (Score:3, Informative)
ELJonline: Linux-Based USPS Mail Sorting System [linuxdevices.com]
NEC Postal Automation [nec.co.jp]
Re:What a good question (Score:3, Funny)
Free OCR? (Score:4, Interesting)
So far as I can tell, NON-free OCR isn't doing so hot either -- you pretty much have to proof-read and correct everything you scan anyway, which just makes it impractical for most purposes. If I had to scan a bunch of records, I'd probably outsource it to a pay service that specializes in that sort of thing, which means it would have to be worth the cost of getting it done.
What I want to know is what's Google going to do about this? They have a catalog search in their Google Labs playpen that indexes products and their descriptions to make them searchable.
In the next few years, I expect to see a fully automated Google OCR product that can not only scan your paper docs, but index them and help you search them too, all while maintaining the electronic copies in their original scanned (think photograph) state, not the some bastardized, mistranslated and screwed up PDF or DOC format.
**THAT'S** what's going to kill Microsoft, and probably why they're so keen to risk overreaching on their IPO.
Re:Free OCR? (Score:2)
http://www.onbase.com/products/onbasemodules/in
Also, why should Google market this product? It's not like they're the only ones who can search OCR documents (if you've used Amazon.com's book searching feature, you'll see the same thing.) Also, it's not like they're going to use PageRank to help them search, because these aren't web pages.
Re:Free OCR? (Score:2)
It does what the above posters said plus it has this really slick way of placing the media - you can spread it out over a half dozen different SANs, some DVD-changers, a SQL database, etc and OnBase will k
Elsiveir publishing did this ages ago (Score:1)
The scienctific publishing house Elsevier [elsevier.com] did this in the mid-90's.
They took the past few years of several of their journals, scanned them in, did a less-than-perfect OCR on them
Re:It's included in Microsoft Office! (Score:1)
I was rooting around in MS Office 2003 and I noticed that it has a category in it's installation setup under "Office Tools" in a little + thing entitled "Microsoft Office Document Imaging." Under this there are three options, "Scanning, OCR and Indexing Filters" "help" and "Microsoft Office Document Image writer." As I had to remove Office 2003 after
Offshoring is probably cheaper (Score:2)
Re:Offshoring is probably cheaper (Score:1)
understanding of the 'gotchas' in english.
document structure and names get mangled the most.
Paperless office killed it? (Score:3, Insightful)
How much paper do you see around you that wasn't already computer generated? Paper still exists as a convenient thing to hang up, or to take to a meeting, but it is always printed. There's no point in complex OCR packages when people can just get the soft copy.
There is very little left to scan. large organizations that are moving from paper to electronic systems aldready keyed the data in manually and don't need the technology anymore. The internet killed the need for faxes, which were unreadable anyway. What's left to OCR?
With that said, my bank doesn't offer online statements, so I scan them every month. But I don't bother to OCR them. My credit card company just started, so that will leave me with one sheet of paper every month.
There's a lot of manual handwritten data generated (Score:1)
Think "teacher's comments" in school records, "officer's comments" on traffic tickets, doctor's notes, and in some countries, paper checks.
Yes, a lot of that is moving towards digital-data-entry, and a lot of the rest is being moved to scan-store-and-shred.
But in the meantime, there's a market for OCR and after-the-fact handwriting recognition.
As an example, the folks at GrokLaw [groklaw.net] are putting SCO-related court case files online
Distributed Proofreaders (Score:4, Informative)
TextBridge - $80 (Score:1)
It is $80 now and there appears to only be a Windows version, but you appear to be running Windows, so no problem there. Enjoy.
paperless office , ocr rant, etc. long (Score:5, Informative)
The term paperless office is considered a joke, and the funny part of it is this: as soon as someone looks up a document in their doc management system they just print it. Even if just to glance at! Copier/printer companies are thrilled!
There are megatons of paper and microfilm out there left to ocr and process. It's considered a pretty fast growing industry, although stunted recently after the bomb and more by the economy.
Having ocr'd images is very handy. Here's an open secret though-- Image+ hidden text pdf.
--Searchable, you have the original doc just as it looked, and the ocr errors don't make such an impact. It's easy to throw into a search engine and the prints look great, and small (b+w use tiff group iv, and jpeg for color jbig is not quite mature yet and only a few apps from cvision do a great job at it)
Anyway, since people just hit print as soon as they find their doc in a system those file cabinets we tried so hard to empty and organize re fill magically.
Also, scanning and setting up an edms (electonic doc managemnt system) is considered a luxury. business move slow with luxury items and usually get to reap the benefits of more mature software and systems (but this is NOT always true!).
Many other slow tech adoption business are just discovering scanning ocr and doc management. Litigation is a great example. xerox was doing quite a few tv ads recently touting that stuff.
The state of ocr itself is strange. There has been a sort of pleague in that industry of 'weird innovation' for years and many buyouts or companys changing the focus of their ocr product to another industry (like web or xml). Even the small office versions ($500 range) are not geared for any sort of reasonable volume or speed without crashing and burning, and usually designed to be babysat. Using these apps leaves the user with a really bad experience. For those not familliar the process goes something like this for a 200 page b+w document:
==
Scan (or import but import is usually crippled)
gaze at loads of memory hogging eye candy (this is what your upgrade bought you usually)
wait
correct skew (wait for crappy tools)
(possibly reboot from crash)
recognize page -slower with each new version even
when hardware is so much faster every year. some recognition is improved in some packages. Some of the latest i've tested take over 15 sec and sometimes over 45 sec per page!
(crash!?)
Correct errors / tune learning engine. (sometimes i swear this effort of teaching goes straight to NULL)
repeat 199 times
Now since you're locked in your desk and finished scanning now it's time to export! (like i didn't know what formats i wanted before i sat down.)
So it chews and chews and maybe crashes causing you to repeat all the above steps. Also note that most of these apps keep all the pages pretty much uncompressed in memory, then create a copy of them in memory for your desired output format. (crash)
2 days of work gone.
====
Most users walk away with the feeling of 'Yikes! all I wanted was a word doc of this. I'll just do something else'
For the home and also small biz market here are some of the 'weird innovations'--
===========
typereader 5 -- pretty good app! doesn't do image+hidden text pdf though. Pitty. has a batch file import and reasonable priced in the $100 range. nice and fast with good results
Typereader 6 and up- file import feature moved to industrial version lots of eye candy less stable minor improvement in recog and a bunch of other silly limits & slow
Omnipage same thing only it's never been great for over 50 pages. horrid workflow and crashes like crazy. very unpredictable!
Omnipage version 3 was better in many ways than omnipage 14. (lightning fast on today's equipment too
abby finereader - very slow but great recognition, more stable but lame workflow-
Re:paperless office , ocr rant, etc. long (Score:2, Funny)
Re:paperless office , ocr rant, etc. long (Score:1)
i'm probably just thick headed tonight but whacha mean by
"and for ++ S/N(/.)" ?
Thanks!
every time you don't print trillions of electrons are forced into slavery.
Re: paperless office , ocr rant, etc. long (Score:1)
Transym OCR (Score:2)
I am heading up a project to convert an out of print computer book to LaTeX (with the author's permission) and one of the volunteers suggested this package. One other nice thing about it is that the registered version comes with API documentation and VB6 source code to the front end, so you can change it however you want as long as you don't need to modify
Freshmeat (Score:2)
deals with OCR:
http://www.pattern-lab.de/gui.html
http://
http://www.gnu.org/software/ocr
http://www.kde.org/apps/kooka/
htt
Paper...? (Score:1)
Service Bureaus (Score:2)
So, $400 buys you a lot of OCR -- especially when you consider you have to pay labor costs, document management costs, etc on top. So, I wouldn't deploy OCR software unless it's a once-in-a-while thing or something thats central to your business process.
OCR is a waste of time (Score:2)
a few ins and outs of OCR (Score:3, Informative)
Here's some quick tips/nuggets of crispy wisdom.
The art of ocr is like working with autistics. give them what they expect. the more surprises, the more episodes.
Don't believe the hype.
Scan black & white to TIFF GROUP IV. OCR systems are optomized for this. Color is new and pretty wacky still. BMP even freaks out in black and white on some packages.
Make sure your background is white and clean, not specled. despeckling tools can be overused and kill ocr results.
3 hole punches regularly show up as o O 0 D
staples: ~
Deskew all images to a line of text, not the page
Scan at 200-300 dpi but not higher than 600 or most apps will choke and produce bad results.
Make a custom dictionary if you can. if you're doing automotive related stuff, look up auto terms and make a dictionary out of it.
To process tiny text (concordences etc) scan at 800dpi and then fool the ocr by scaling the image to 300. sounds nuts right? ok try it the logcal way first and then come back and try this teq.
Shaded text is a new thing in document as is inverted text blocks (thanks word...you make my job hell.)you must remove the shading with something like scanfix by tms sequioa- good tool for small doc cleanup for pre-ocr. requires practice and trial and error. interface needs some work though.
Dot matrix prints should be scanned and some blur added to join the dots (unless you are using something expressedly made for dmp's) as always your milage may vary
Turn off auto rotate (mangle)features. They are not very smart an often have monkeyvision. just review your images before hand and rotate accordingly.
If you're scanning something poster size, or engineering drawing size (not recommended for most ocr) cut it into smaller images. ideally regions of interest not larger than 8.5x11
Remember 99% accurate means 1 character per hundred will be screwed up.
Table of contents pages are an interesting test for ocr especially if they use periods to lead to page numbers. How many identical characters can occur before the ocr system misreads. often quite telling.
OCRing a spreadsheet and using the data with out verifying every character? may the monkeygods help you.
Above applies to processing screenshots, 17'th century print, tabloid print, multi-column, shaded background handwriting w/o special software, modern magazines, etc.
OCR does not like non seriffed fonts much.
The post office spends millions on theirs and they have a nice address DB list to verify against.
Over 90% of banks scan your checks and microfilm them. (and there is some really cool signature verification sofware out there for forgery detection) MICR font at the bottom helps them immensely.
Breaking down your document into areas can be useful. changing fonts and sizes sometimes throw it off . an example would be computer lit with code snippets interspersed.
Do yourself a favor if it applies and use image+hidden text pdf. raw ocr is almost always yucky and all those claims of preserving document layout and format are just that--claims.
If you do use i+HT pdf, or for a larger job for that matter, do it in small chunks so your app doesn't crash. for pdf, join the small documents together in acrobat later or use other tools to do so.
For fun and science, take an old apple newton 100 and trace over some of the text on your page and compare its results to your ocr package.
Anyway i hope that helps someone avoid a few landmines and there are many more tips out there. these are from my experience and off the cuff.
Gone, but possibly coming back soon (Score:2)
Anyways, the possible comeback of OCR may occur in the near future, with the inevitable ubiquity of camera phones and processor power behing them. I sure could use a phone that could scan an URL from a newspaper and take me there. Or call a phone number pri
I do this for a living. (Score:2)
And people WOULD pay more for better accuracy. My company pays huge amounts for OCR work, usually getting in boxes of CD's each week.
Lawyers consume OCR capacity like it was Wine the night before Prohibition starts up.
Yes we use the low end junk they put out now, but we would love to pay much more money for stuff that was even 10% better. Right now, even OCR of Typed documents SUCKS!!!. Yes it is 99+% accurate, but one letter off in one hundred mea
Re:I do this for a living. (Score:2)
If it happens often, I can't believe the OCR software doesn't have some way of flagging unlikely usages of '$' with suggested autocorrection.
Re:I do this for a living. (Score:2)
Here is a free one (Score:1)
http://www.simpleocr.com