They assume that material fits on a rectangular page.
The current slate of good document recognition OCR engines use a mix of techniques to read text from images, but they are all optimized for documents. In most cases if you need a complete, accurate transcription you’ll have to do additional review and correction. None got perfect results on trickier documents, but most were good enough to make text significantly more comprehensible. Most of the tools handled a clean document just fine. The quality of results varied between applications, but there wasn’t a stand out winner. You can use the scripts to check our work, or to run your own documents against any of the clients we tested.
We tested three free and open source options (Calamari, OCRopus and Tesseract) as well as one desktop app (Adobe Acrobat Pro) and three cloud services (Abbyy Cloud, Google Cloud Vision, and Microsoft Azure Computer Vision).Īll the scripts we used, as well as the complete output from each OCR engine, are available on GitHub. We selected several documents-two easy to read reports, a receipt, an historical document, a legal filing with a lot of redaction, a filled in disclosure form, and a water damaged page-to run through the OCR engines we are most interested in. Some are quite expensive, some are free and open source. Some are easy to use, some require a bit of programming to make them work, some require a lot of programming. There are a lot of OCR options available. We couldn’t find single side by side comparison of the most accessible OCR options, so we ran a handful of documents through seven different tools, and compared the results. We have been testing the components that already exist so we can prioritize our own efforts. One of our projects at Factful is to build tools that make state of the art machine learning and artificial intelligence accessible to investigative reporters. OCR, or optical character recognition, allows us to transform a scan or photograph of a letter or court filing into searchable, sortable text that we can analyze. Do you need to pay a lot of money to get reliable OCR results? Is Google Cloud Vision actually better than Tesseract? Are any cutting edge neural network-based OCR engines worth the time investment of getting them set up? As OCR software, it uses the free OCR API from.
As a result Copyfish works with every website, even videos and PDF documents.įor developers: Copyfish is published under the GPL open-source license. Instead, it lets you mark the text in the image you want to extract. Copyfish solves the same problem, but it takes a different user interface approach.
Mark the area of the subtitle once and then use the "Do OCR" button to grab the latest text from the movie screen.įor extension gurus: You might have heard of Project Naptha, a great addon that applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. Especially for the subtitle translation use case, Copyfish has a repeat feature. And if you want, Copyfish also translates the text for you. Text inside images, in tricky Javascript/AJAX or, especially, in movie subtitles on Youtube or Youku is unreachable for them. You can verify the results in one glance with the extracted text overlay.ĭo you need to switch between OCR languages often? You can define "Quick Switch" buttons for up to three languages on the settings page.įor language learners: There are many translator addons available, but they only work with plain website text. “Images” come in many forms: photographs, charts, diagrams, screenshots, PDF documents, comics, error messages, memes, Flash – and Youtube movies. Copyfish is soooo much faster and more fun. Until now, your only option was to retype the text. Copyfish turns text within any image captured from your screen into an editable format without retyping – making it easy to reuse in digital documents, emails or reports.Ĭommon reasons to extract text from images are to google it, store it, email it or translate it. Do you need to extract text from images, videos or PDF? If yes, then the Copyfish Screenshot Reader is for you. Copy, paste and translate text from any image, video or PDF.