Comment by hakunin
3 months ago
Wish someone benchmarked Apple Vision Framework against these others. It's built into most Apple devices, but people don't know you can actually harness it to do fast, good quality OCR for you (and go a few extra steps to produce searchable pdfs, which is my typical use case). I'm very curious where it would fall in the benchmarks.
It is unusable trash for languages with any vertical writing such as Japanese. It simply doesn’t work.
Yeah, and fails quickly at anything handwritten.
I mostly OCR English, so Japanese (as mentioned by parent) wouldn't be an issue for me, but I do care about handwriting. See, these insights are super helpful. If only there was, say, a benchmark to show these.
My main question really is: what are practical OCR tools that I can string together on my MacBook Pro M1 Max w/ 64GB Ram to maximize OCR quality for lots of mail and schoolwork coming into my house, all mostly in English.
I use ScanSnap Manager with its built in OCR tools, but that's probably super outdated by now. Apple Vision does way better job than that. I heard people say also that Apple Vision is better than Tesseract. But is there something better still that's also practical to run in a scripted environment on my machine?
LiveText too? It has a newer engine
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Interesting. How do you harness it for that purpose? I've found apple ocr to be very good.
The short answer is a tool like OwlOCR (which also has CLI support). The long answer is that there are tools on github (I created the stars list: https://github.com/stars/maxim/lists/apple-vision-framework/) that try to use the framework for various things. I’m also trying to build an ffi-based Ruby gem that provides convenient access in Ruby to the framework’s functionality.
Apple shortcuts allows you to use OCR on images you pass into it. Looking for “ Extract Text from Image”
Yeah, if it was cross-platform maybe more people would be curious about it, but something that can only run on ~10% of the hardware people have doesn't make it very attractive to even begin to spend time on Apple-exclusive stuff.
But you can have an apple device deployed in your stack to handle the OCR, right? I get on-device is a hardware limitation for many, but if you have an apple device in your stack, can’t you leverage this?
Yeah, but handling macOS is a infrastructure-capacity sucks, Apple really doesn't want you to so tooling is almost none existing. I've setup CI/CD stacks before that needed macOS builders and it's always the most cumbersome machines to manage as infrastructure.
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10% of hardware is an insanely vast amount, no?
Well, it's 90% less than what everyone else uses, so even if the total number is big, relatively it has a small user-base.
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