ScribeOCR – Web interface for recognizing text, OCR, & creating digitized docs

8 days ago (github.com)

I really like the idea, but unfortunately it could not cope with my usecase.

I have some lecture slides as image-only PDF (Hungarian language with a sparkle of English and Latin (biology)). I tried the tool on it and I had the following experience:

- proofreading with the overlay seems like a good idea, actually it is unusable when the original text has colors, and you need to recognize diacritic marks. Being able to show the original in grayscale or black&white could help. (BW worked, but Grayscale left everything colored)

- For proofreading the ebook mode was the most useful, I immediately spotted lots of errors that I could not see with overlay. A quick switch between the modes would be useful

- Editing text is not efficient when error rate is high (Hungarian language is not supported, that caused it mostly I guess), the interface has high overhead for mass corrections.

Very good idea, I think after a little polish it would even fit my usecase. For more traditional OCR usecases than mine it is probably already great.

According to what I read in the documentation, it uses Tesseract underneath. I've used Tesseract v3 in the past and it was pain. Tesseract 4 uses LSTM neural net. How good is the performance and quality of the recognition nowadays in v4? Could anyone share his experience?

This is my first encounter with Scribe.js; since I have many book scans I always try OCRing them when I see this. Compared to Tesseract (which is the best I have so far), it gets the words right slightly more, but the paragraph segmentation is many times worse. On a book where every paragraph is indented, it reliably decides two consecutive one-line paragraphs are the same paragraph, which is understandable, but a downgrade from Tesseract which gets the paragraph segmentation as correct as possible (It doesn't handle paragraphs that spanpage-breaks, since I'm feeding it one page at a time)

  • Scribe is Tesseract. It uses tesseract.js which is a Web Assembly port of Tesseract. So they in theory should be equal. In practice custom settings or older versions could make a difference.

    • What's the motivation for doing this in the browser? It seems like intentionally choosing a more difficult path to create an inferior result.

      A native MacOS or Windows application could use the OCR facilities of the operating system and, in my experience, both produce results that are far better than Tesseract.

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  • > Tesseract (which is the best I have so far)

    Have you looked at EasyOCR?

    • EasyOCR is significantly worse than Tesseract for clean printed text and , while being orders of magnitude slower; far better than Tesseract for low-quality clean scans and extracting text from pictures (e.g. comics), which Tesseract does not as well.

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This is awesome. Only issue was I had to disable my JShelter extension because it would freeze the page using 100% CPU forever.