Comparison of optical character recognition software

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This comparison of optical character recognition software includes:

Sortable table
NameFounded yearLatest stable versionLatest release yearLicenseOnline Windows Mac OS X Linux BSD AndroidiOSProgramming language SDK?LanguagesFontsOutput FormatsNotes
ABBYY FineReader 1989162022 Proprietary YesYesYesNoYesYesYesC/C++Yes192 [1] All fontsDOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPTX, RTF, PDF, HTML, CSV, TXT, ODT, DjVu, EPUB, FB2 [2] ABBYY also supplies SDKs for embedded and mobile devices. Professional, Corporate and Site License Editions for Windows, Express Edition for Mac. [3]
AIDA 201613.02024 Proprietary YesYesYesYesYesYesYesNoAll languages using Latin alphabetMachine and handprinted text, Latin alphabetDOCX, XLSX, PPTX, TXT, CSV, PDF, JSON, XMLAIDA is able to learn how to extract any value from any document, with a single click on a single document. [4]
AnyDoc Software 1989 ? ? Proprietary NoYesNoNoNo ? ?VBScript ? ? ?Works with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents.
Asprise OCR SDK1998152015 Proprietary YesYesYesYesYes ? ?Java, C#,VB.NET, C/C++/DelphiYes20+ [5]  ?Plain text, searchable PDF, XML [6] Java, C#, VB.NET, C/C++/Delphi SDKs for OCR and Barcode recognition on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Unix. [7]
CuneiForm 19961.12011 BSD variantNoYesYesYesYes ? ?C/C++Yes28Any printed fontHTML, hOCR, native, RTF, TeX, TXT [8] Enterprise-class system, can save text formatting and recognizes complicated tables of any structure
E-aksharayan 2010YesNoYesNo ? ?14RTF, TXT, BRL
GOCR 20000.52 [9] 2018 GPL Yes [10] YesYesYesYes ? ?C ?20+ ?
Google Drive OCR or Google Cloud Vision 2015 Proprietary YesBrowserBrowserBrowserUnknown ? ?UnknownYes200+All fontstextGoogle blog post [11] [12]
Microsoft Office Document Imaging  ?Office 20072007 Proprietary NoYesNoNoNo ? ? ? ? ? ?Uses OmniPage[ citation needed ]
Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 2011 ?2007 Proprietary NoYesNoNoNo ? ? ? ? ? ?
OCRFeeder 2009-030.8.52022 GPL NoNoNoYesNo ? ?Python ? ? ?Features a full user interface and has a command-line tool for automatic operations. Has its own segmentation algorithm but uses system-wide OCR engines like Tesseract or Ocrad
Ocrad  ?0.29 [13] 2024 GPL YesNoYesYesYes ? ?C++YesLatin alphabet ?Command line
OCRopus 20071.3.32017 Apache NoNoYesYesYes ? ?Python ?All languages using Latin script (other languages can be trained)Normal Latin script and Fraktur (other scripts can be trained)TXT, hOCR, [14] PDF [15] Pluggable framework under active development, used for Google Books
OmniPage 1970s19.22015 Proprietary YesYesYesYesNo ? ?C/C++, C# [16] Yes125 [17] Machine and handprinted fontsDOC/DOCX XLS/XLSX PPTX RTF PDF PDF/A Searchable PDF HTML Text XML ePUB MP3Product of Nuance Communications
Puma.NET  ? ?2009 BSD NoYesNoNoNo ? ?C#Yes28Any printed font .NET OCR SDK based on Cognitive Technologies' CuneiForm recognition engine. Wraps Puma COM server and provides simplified API for .NET applications
ReadSoft  ? ? ? Proprietary NoYesNoNoNo ? ? ? ? ? ?Scan, capture and classify business documents such as invoices, forms and purchase orders integrated with business processes.
Scantron  ? ? ? Proprietary NoYesNoNoNo ? ? ? ? ? ?For working with localized interfaces, corresponding language support is required.
SmartScore 199110.5.82015 Proprietary NoYesYesNoNo ? ? ? ? ? ?For musical scores
Tesseract 19855.4.12024 Apache NoYesYesYesYes ? ?C++, CYes100+ [18] Any printed fontText, ALTO, hOCR, [19] PDF, others with different user interfaces [20] or the APICreated by Hewlett-Packard; under further development by Google [21]
NameFounded yearLatest stable versionRelease yearLicenseOnline Windows Mac OS X Linux BSD AndroidiOSProgramming languageSDK?LanguagesFontsOutput FormatsNotes

Evaluation

A 2016 analysis of the accuracy and reliability of the OCR packages Google Docs OCR, Tesseract, ABBYY FineReader, and Transym, employing a dataset including 1227 images from 15 different categories concluded Google Docs OCR and ABBYY to be performing better than others. [22]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Optical character recognition</span> Computer recognition of visual text

Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene photo or from subtitle text superimposed on an image.

This is a comparison of both historical and current web browsers based on developer, engine, platform(s), releases, license, and cost.

DocuShare® is a content management system developed by Xerox Corporation. It uses open standards and allows for managing content, integrating it with other business systems, and creating customized and packaged software applications.

OmniPage is an optical character recognition (OCR) application available from Kofax Incorporated.

This article compares computer software tools that are used for accomplishing comparisons of files of various types. The file types addressed by individual file comparison apps varies but may include text, symbols, images, audio, or video. This category of software tool is often called "file comparison" or "diff tool", but those effectively are equivalent terms — where the term "diff" is more commonly associated with the Unix diff utility.

PaperPort is commercial document management software published by Tungsten Automation, used for working with scanned documents. It uses a built-in optical character recognition to create files in searchable Portable Document Format (PDF); text in these files is indexed and can be searched for with appropriate software, such as Microsoft's Windows Search. Earlier versions of PaperPort used OmniPage to provide this function. It provides image editing tools for these files.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tesseract (software)</span> Free optical character recognition engine

Tesseract is an optical character recognition engine for various operating systems. It is free software, released under the Apache License. Originally developed by Hewlett-Packard as proprietary software in the 1980s, it was released as open source in 2005 and development was sponsored by Google in 2006.

ABBYY FineReader PDF is an optical character recognition (OCR) application developed by ABBYY. First released in 1993, the program runs on Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS. Since v15, the Windows version can also edit PDF files.

Ocrad is an optical character recognition program and part of the GNU Project. It is free software licensed under the GNU GPL.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OCRopus</span>

OCRopus is a free document analysis and optical character recognition (OCR) system released under the Apache License v2.0 with a very modular design using command-line interfaces.

hOCR is an open standard of data representation for formatted text obtained from optical character recognition (OCR). The definition encodes text, style, layout information, recognition confidence metrics and other information using Extensible Markup Language (XML) in the form of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or XHTML.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OCRFeeder</span>

OCRFeeder is an optical character recognition suite for GNOME, which also supports virtually any command-line OCR engine, such as CuneiForm, GOCR, Ocrad and Tesseract. It converts paper documents to digital document files and can serve to make them accessible to visually impaired users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audiveris</span> Open source tool for optical music recognition

Audiveris is an open source tool for optical music recognition (OMR).

Asprise OCR is a commercial optical character recognition and barcode recognition SDK library that provides an API to recognize text as well as barcodes from images and output in formats like plain text, XML and searchable PDF.

Indic OCR refers to the process of converting text images written in Indic scripts into e-text using Optical character recognition (OCR) techniques. Broadly, it can also refer to the OCR systems of Brahmic scripts for languages of South Asia and Southeast Asia, not just the scripts of the Indian subcontinent, which are all written in an abugida-based writing system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scene text</span> Text captured as part of outdoor surroundings in a photograph

Scene text is text that appears in an image captured by a camera in an outdoor environment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ABBYY</span> American digital intelligence company

ABBYY is an American technology company specializing in AI-powered document processing and automation, data capture, process mining and optical character recognition (OCR). It was founded in the USSR and operated in Russia for nine years before moving to the United States. Primarily focused on software as a service model, the company serves clients worldwide. One of ABBYY's best-known products is ABBYY FineReader, an optical character recognition (OCR) computer program.

References

  1. "ABBYY FineReader 14: Technical Specifications". Finereader.abbyy.com. Retrieved 2017-02-23.
  2. "ABBYY FineReader 11: Technical Specifications". Finereader.abbyy.com. Retrieved 2013-09-12.
  3. "Top OCR Software". Ocrworld.com. 2010-03-30. Archived from the original on 2017-02-23. Retrieved 2013-09-12.
  4. "AIDA". TCLAB. 2024-12-03. Retrieved 2024-12-03.
  5. "Asprise OCR SDK Features". asprise.com. Retrieved 2014-06-21.
  6. "Asprise Java OCR Library Features". asprise.com. Retrieved 2014-06-21.
  7. "Asprise Java, C#/VB.NET OCR API". asprise.com. 2015-11-19. Retrieved 2015-11-19.
  8. Debian manual page for Cuneiform for Linux version 1.1.0
  9. "GOCR Homepage". wasd.urz.uni-magdeburg.de. Retrieved 2018-10-17.
  10. "GOCR". Jocr.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2013-09-12.
  11. "Supported languages". Feb 11, 2022.
  12. Ashok Popat (Sep 4, 2015). "IEEE SPS: Optical Character Recognition for Most of the World's Languages". YouTube . Archived from the original on 2021-12-20.
  13. Diaz, Antonio (2024-01-20). "GNU Ocrad 0.29 released" (Mailing list). info-gnu.
  14. OCRopus includes the ocropus-hocr tool which produces hOCR from the recognition results.
  15. In combination with the hocr-tools
  16. "OmniPage CSDK - OCR Document Capture Toolkit | Document Imaging & OCR". Nuance. Archived from the original on 2010-08-24. Retrieved 2013-09-12.
  17. "OmniPage Standard Document Conversion". Nuance. Archived from the original on 2014-03-13. Retrieved 2014-02-25.
  18. Based on count of language training files for version 3.04. Available at the download page.
  19. Usage explained in the Tesseract Readme and FAQ
  20. Such as ODF with OCRFeeder
  21. "GitHub - tesseract-ocr/tesseract: Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine (main repository)". GitHub . Retrieved 2018-11-05.
  22. Assefi, Mehdi (2016-12-01). "OCR as a Service: An Experimental Evaluation of Google Docs OCR, Tesseract, ABBYY FineReader, and Transym". ResearchGate . Retrieved 2019-01-31.