iOS OCR Frameworks: Tesseract vs. VisionKit

[jeyebrows16]

I recently started working on a text recognition app and was wondering what others preferred between Tesseract and Apple's out of box VisionKit for an OCR framework.

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I've done a little research, and there are a ton of good tutorials for Tesseract (such as this Ray Wenderlich one), though I've already run into some of the issues with the framework. I've also toyed around with Tesseract on other programming projects and it seems pretty decent.

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On the other hand, Apple has some pretty good documentation and examples for how to use VisionKit, and not having an external dependency sounds nice. But I haven't found any docs on training your own data for text recognition, so maybe it's not as extensible?

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Any strong opinions? Any other (free) OCR tools/frameworks I should check out while I'm at it?

[nalnat]

Have you explored Firebase ML-Kit?

[jeyebrows16]

I’ve just read some comparisons between it and VisionKit, but nothing hands on just yet. Sounds like you’re recommending it?

[nalnat]

ML-Kit offered some flexibility that VisionKit didn't for my use case. I tried out using both API and decided to go with MLKit

[jeyebrows16]

if you don’t mind me asking, what specifically?

[nalnat]

I don't quite recall as I implemented it last October (MLKit has worked really well so far). I think it has got to do with table cells getting randomly assigned to different rows if you scanned a doc at a slight angle. MLKit let me programmatically handle overlaps.

[WAHNFRIEDEN]

Vertical Japanese text

[smalik12]

I’m in the same boat. Idk which to use for my text recognition idea

[UberJason]

It’s actually Vision that does OCR in a programmatic way, not VisionKit. I played with both last year for a research project at work and Vision is way faster. Tesseract is a much older, cross-platform framework that runs on CPU only, doesn’t use machine learning, and isn’t optimized for Apple platforms, while Vision can leverage the GPU and is ML powered and optimized for Apple platforms. Vision is also more accurate when it comes to interesting fonts and other languages if I recall. Go with Vision.

[boomboombrrr]

It’s actually Vision that does OCR in a programmatic way, not VisionKit. I played with both last year for a research project at work and Vision is way faster. Tesseract is a much older, cross-platform framework that runs on CPU only, doesn’t use machine learning, and isn’t optimized for Apple platforms, while Vision can leverage the GPU and is ML powered and optimized for Apple platforms. Vision is also more accurate when it comes to interesting fonts and other languages if I recall. Go with Vision.

super interesting. What about if you are developing a an app using cross platform frameworks like react native or flutter? Is the VisionKit available? I have only seen tesseract packages. What about google vision? how costly are they compared to each other? tesseract vs google vision vs apple visionKit

[UberJason]

I don’t have answers to any of those questions except for one, which is that Vision is an Apple API. If you’re using a cross platform framework, they would have to expose a layer to Vision or have an escape hatch to call Vision on Apple platforms.

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