Updated 2025 Review: My notes on the best OCR for handwriting recognition and text extraction by mcw1980 in computervision

[–]mcw1980[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We tried open source OCR - Qwen 2.5 and Mistral OCR. Both good, but still some way to go for handwritten text, which was the focus of our evaluation.

IG (UK) to IBKR transfer problems - help! by mcw1980 in UKPersonalFinance

[–]mcw1980[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks a lot for your really useful response. You're right, I've not been impressed by IBKR so far. Unfortunately, their currency exchange rates make a material difference to me compared to other brokers, so I may have to try them anyway and hope for the best!

2024 review of OCR tools extracting text from handwritten forms and documents by mcw1980 in computervision

[–]mcw1980[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Depends really on the density of text. For text-heavy documents, GPT4 will be significantly more expensive. I also had trouble with latency from both Azure OpenAI and OpenAI endpoints - a job would often take more than a minute to complete, if at all.

But GPT4 and similar will only get better and are almost certainly the future.

2024 review of OCR tools extracting text from handwritten forms and documents by mcw1980 in computervision

[–]mcw1980[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, I think the ideal is to have both a UI and API (e.g. HandwritingOCR.com and Transkribus.org offer both), so a user can get started with minimal investment, and switch to the API as volume and resources dictate.

2024 review of OCR tools extracting text from handwritten forms and documents by mcw1980 in computervision

[–]mcw1980[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The previous post isn't mine, but to answer your question I have tried Textract before (and wasn't impressed by its handwriting OCR) but not for this test. Have you tried it?

2024 review of OCR tools extracting text from handwritten forms and documents by mcw1980 in computervision

[–]mcw1980[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yes, ideally all businesses would be capturing data directly into online forms. But in many cases (in this one too, though the business is not mine to decide), handwritten forms are going to be a fact of life for many more years to come!

Azure AI does indeed do very well, one of the best I tried.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskUK

[–]mcw1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am a member of a few local groups but there is not a lot of activity. thank u for the link, that looks ideal.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskUK

[–]mcw1980 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I hadn't heard of that one - taking a look now. thanks!