OCR Engines Tested
- Tesseract Tesseract is free and open source.
- Microsoft OCR Library Sample App The microsoft OCR library appears to be free. The implementaion I used seems to only work for windows store apps.
- Abbyy Fine Reader 12 Abbyy fine reader is a packaged software, but It appears that they also license their engine to developers.
- LEADTOOLS OCR SDK Lead tools is well know for their imaging related developer tools.
(links go to company websites for more information)
The Test Image
I created this image containing text in various sizes and styles and fed it to the OCR engines. |
| The OCR test image |
Tesseract Result
Using Tesseract, it output the following text:DneszmsDcKzmngruHywurk> H -
How about a bigger font?
1254-5678'? I13
Whai‘ abow{’Hr\4'4«fow{'?
Microsoft OCR library Result
Using the Microsoft OCR Library Sample App, this was the result: |
| microsoft OCR library test result |
Abbyy Fine Reader Result
Here is a partial screenshot of the results produced by Abbyy Fine Reader 12 : |
| Abby Fine Reader Result |
LEADTOOLS OCR SDK Result
The LEADTOOLS OCR SDK produced the following results:
 |
| LEADTOOLS OCR SDK Result |
Several reason for that since Leadtools, ABBYY or either our Yunmai solution are use by various industry around the world:
ReplyDelete1] the image you try to ocr is way too small (low account of pixel per character)
2] the image sample size is ridiculously small (1 picture?)
To appreciate accuracy and performance of OCR you need to test in "real" working situation, 300dpi for A4 document, a large variety of samples.
If you would like to change your mind about OCR and daily usage try to download a business card scanner application on your mobile phone and you'll see that, even if the OCR result are not 100%, you can save a lot of time on data entry using this pieces of software.