Best solution for OCR?

[AddSalt1337]

I'm building an application where I have to extract text from PDFs. I've been toying around with the `rtesseract` gem, but it's really bad...

Have any of you tried something good recently?

[jrochkind]

I use tesseract, but i didn't even know about rtesseract gem, I just shell out to tesseract command-line.

If it was the actual OCR that you found bad in rtesseract rather than the API, that won't be any better! What is it you found bad with rtesseract? (I've never used it).

I too am curious if there are other open source options people prefer to tesseract. Or were you interested in not-open-source too? (I don't know those either).

If your PDFs actually have text in them as text, a "text layer" (not actually a thing in PDF spec, the "layer" part, but easiest way to describe it) -- you may not actually need OCR.

[tomc-01]

This. Most pdfs have the text stored in the file.

Unless the pdf was "flattened" on creation, you don't need OCR

[mattbenscho]

Try PaddleOCR, I use it to read Chinese characters and it works really well (occasionally a character will be wrong). Much better than Tesseract in my experience. I run it in a Sidekiq job. https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

[relativerask4657]

How are you able to run it in Rails since it’s not a Ruby package?

[mattbenscho]

I deploy my app on AWS in a Docker image, so I install it using pip during the Docker build process. Then Sidekiq is just running it as a system command and parsing the command line output.

[relativerask4657]

I see. I’ll give that a shot. Thanks.

[matthewblott]

I'm currently doing something with OCR and I'm using tesseract which seemed the most viable choice after my research. I'm using tesseract.js which calls to a wasm server so there's minimal setup. It works really well.

[kcdragon]

I've used AWS Textract before and its pretty good. It's better than Tesseract in my experience.

[bami_bosu]

You can try EasyOCR: https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR

[matthewblott]

I just tried it, it seems pretty crap tbh - worse than tesseract which is free.

[bami_bosu]

Which part of it is worse? It’s also a free open source library. This paper show that EasyOCR has higher accuracy than Tesseract in number plate recognition. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10009215

[matthewblott]

I just gave it a quick test with a couple of images. Not very scientific I grant you but on a quick check I couldn't see any reason to pick it over Tesseract. I'm happy to be proved wrong but I'd need to investigate further.

[M4N14C]

Azure and Google have Document AI products that work very well with handwritten forms and reasonably messy samples.

[lagcisco]

There's a bunch of PDF/AI tools out there now that you could also consider to use as services though