tika-python VS PaddleOCR

At my previous job we had the same problem which we solved by using Tika. We called it on the server along with other stuff, but there is also a Python binding.

Tika is from Apache so yes its original code base is Java but it has bindings in other languages. Checkout Tika-Python!

The Textractor instance is the main entrypoint for extracting text. This method is backed by Apache Tika, a robust text extraction library written in Java. Apache Tika has support for a large number of file formats: PDF, Word, Excel, HTML and others. The Python Tika package automatically installs Tika and starts a local REST API instance used to read extracted data.

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.