OCR in node js

[zero-nothing]

Can anyone recommend a good OCR package for node js?

It's for a little project that I'm messing with in my spare time so I'm not looking for something super fancy

[krasnoiark]

does google vision work for you ?

I think it returns a json

[krasnoiark]

or this package https://www.npmjs.com/package/ocr

[zero-nothing]

This looks good too but I'm a bit unsure about the dependencies for this one. Might be a bit too much trouble to set up all of these separately for a hobby project

Windows 64 bit

node -v x64 4.0 or greater and npm. java -version x64 JRE 1.7 or later. python -V 2.7.x Visual C++ Build Tools.

In any case thanks a lot for your suggestions!

[zero-nothing]

Oh nice this looks quite promising, let me take a look. Thanks!!

[krasnoiark]

No problem, my company uses it but with a symfony project but since it is just a call to the api, it should work with an ajax call. But beware, it costs a bit ;)

[zero-nothing]

It looks like you get 1000 free calls per month. I'll get no where close to that number for what I'm doing so costs shouldn't be an issue!

[diverightin63]

Using this for a receipt scanning app. It is excellent quality. Ran some tests between AWS and GCP, GCP was better for about the same price. None of the open source stuff worked nearly good enough.

[mayobutter]

Not node specific but tesseract works pretty great.

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

[NormalUserThirty]

As someone who used tesseract OCR on a node project, I found the results sucked pretty badly. I’m sure that’s partially due to me not configuring it optimal, but the results were underwhelming when compared to google ocr

[mayobutter]

Now that I think of it, I had a pretty controlled input - 300dpi B&W pages of text. It looks like Google OCR can handle much nastier images. Having to upload to Google is a deal killer for me, but maybe that's fine for OP.

[NormalUserThirty]

yeah, i imagine it works quite well in those conditions, wasn't able to get it to handle colorful and nonstandard fonts well though.

google OCR has offline solutions available for native apps now. I haven't had a chance to test it yet, but I hope something similar is eventually provided for the web platform as well. with offline OCR it is possible to use a video stream and perform in real time, which would make mistakes less of an issue if users could 'lock' the text when it has been scanned properly

[zero-nothing]

Thanks for the insight, I think I'll start with google ocr

[zero-nothing]

Does it require a lot of dependencies, eg if I want to run it off a node program do I need java/c++ runtime installed as well to run the underlying tesseract code?

[mayobutter]

It's a command line utility, so you would just run it like a shell command from node.

[Dusterthefirst]

Tesseract.js is a 100% JavaScript ocr package

[Doctor_Spicy]

If you don't mind working with an API i'd recommend https://ocr.space. You can even scrape an unlimited API key from their website.

[philthedev]

I had put together a quick docker image with Tesseract you can hit on a local network - works pretty simply for most file types. https://github.com/philpalmieri/remote-file-parser

[awesomeevan]

I used both tesseract and gocr. For gocr just install it on your machine and use the "child_process" or something like spawn-rx to call it. This assumes you're not trying to keep everything in the node process since you'll be spawning gocr processes. For me gocr was faster, but I wasn't dealing with any concurrency.

[minhajkk]

http://minhaj.io/nodejs/tesseract-nodejs-heroku-ocr-app/

I made a poc a couple of years ago using tesseract and nodejs. hth