PaddleOCR VS Tesseract.js

PyTesseract Module [ Github ] EasyOCR Module [ Github ] PaddlePaddle OCR [ Github ]

My default recommendation for OCR is https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR but most of the examples there are not handwritten - so I'm not sure how well it'll handle it this time.

Other than EasyOCR and Tesseract, PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR) is probably the most well known open-source OCR solution.

What are you planning to do with the text after detecting / recognizing it? How fast does the detection / recognition need to be in order to be useful?

Yup! But I'm still exploring options. (any recommendations would be welcomed!) Here are some candidates I'm considering:

- https://github.com/mindee/doctr

- https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmocr

- https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR (honestly I don't know Mandarin so I'm a bit stuck)

- https://github.com/clovaai/donut - While it's primarily an "OCR-free document understanding transformer," I think it's worth experimenting with. Think I can sort this out by letting the LLM reason through it multiple times (although this will impact performance)

- yesterday got a suggestion to consider https://github.com/kakaobrain/pororo - I don't think development is still active but the results are pretty great on Korean text

For images with text, if you want to do visual qa, document classification, table/key information extraction, checkout https://huggingface.co/blog/document-ai https://github.com/philschmid/document-ai-transformers https://github.com/google-research/pix2struct https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/release/2.6/ppstructure/README.md

EasyOCR is a popular project if you are in an environment where you can use run Python and PyTorch (https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR). Other open source projects of note are PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR) and docTR (https://github.com/mindee/doctr).

I think you can train tesseract with custom data if you have enough, or you can use deep learning models like https://pyimagesearch.com/2020/08/17/ocr-with-keras-tensorflow-and-deep-learning or https://www.google.com/amp/s/nanonets.com/blog/attention-ocr-for-text-recogntion/amp/ or try other existing tools like paddle-ocr https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

https://huggingface.co/blog/document-ai https://github.com/microsoft/table-transformer https://github.com/google-research/pix2struct https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/release/2.6/ppstructure/table/README.md

when following the installation commands present in the paddleocr repo(https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/release/2.6/doc/doc_en/quickstart_en.md) im still unable to install paddleocr. paddlepaddle is successfully installed on my m1 mac with python3.9.16 but while installing paddleocr im getting this error after long pip backtracking

When I was evaluating options a few months ago I found https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR to be a very strong contender for my use case (reading product labels), but you'll definitely want to put together some representative docs/images and test a bunch of solutions to see what works for you.

What do you have against tesseract.js?

Are you able to use a OCR library in the browser? Here is one I found

But keep in mind, PDFs can be fully or partially made of images, and if you want text out of those, you will need to OCR them. There's tesseract.js for that.

Tesseract.js

YOu could try using tesseract.js to OCR the images. Though might be a challenge to figure out the times/days of the classes.

I've never used it - but Tesseract.js looks interesting. Perhaps you can use it as a foundation on which to build something like the AWS tool (which seems to work by overlaying an SVG over the top of the image, then manipulates that SVG when user clicks on a results tag to get the word/phrase's highlight box to display)?

I tried researching a little on this topic, so from what I understand to achieve this feature, I would need a library that supports Optical character Recognition (OCR) such as Tesseract.js or Google ML Kit to do it. However, I'm not too sure if these libraries will be supported on React Native apps.

It's definitely one of the best for on-the-fly OCR, but I think a server-based implementation using Google's Vision API would be way better. Definitely not mine, the AI used here is way beyond my skill level - link: https://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/