Comment by BugsJustFindMe

20 hours ago

> I don’t think I believe that OCR can’t do it but random humans can

I do.

> OCR is VERY good

Uh, my experience is extremely different.

25 comments

BugsJustFindMe

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jncfhnb  19 hours ago

I would challenge you to find a picture of text that you think a human can read and OCR cannot. I’m happy to demonstrate. The text shown in this article is trivial.

  • demosthanos  19 hours ago

    The archivists themselves say that they run into such texts often enough that this program was needed:

    > The agency uses artificial intelligence and a technology known as optical character recognition to extract text from historical documents. But these methods don’t always work, and they aren’t always accurate.

    They are absolutely aware of the advances in these tools, so if they say they're not completely there yet I believe them. One likely reason is that the models probably have less 1800s-era cursive in their training set than they do modern cursive.

    It's likely that with more human-tagged data they could improve on the state of the art for OCR, but it's pretty arrogant to doubt the agency in charge of this sort of thing when they say the tech isn't there yet.

  • AdieuToLogic  19 hours ago

    > I would challenge you to find a picture of text that you think a human can read and OCR cannot.

    Are you aware of CAPTCHA[0] images?

    0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

  • BugsJustFindMe  7 hours ago

    Yeah ok, but it might take me a few tries because I don't know what you're using. I hope that's agreeable?

    What does your OCR say that these say? The first one isn't too hard for a human (assuming appropriate language skill). The second one is a bit more difficult.

    https://imgur.com/a/CDU6Lgs