Overview

Tesseract OCR

Stacks95

Followers286

Votes7

GitHub Stars70.7K

Forks10.4K

scanR

Stacks2

Followers44

Votes0

Google Cloud Vision API

Stacks134

Followers276

Votes16

Google Cloud Vision API vs Tesseract OCR vs scanR: What are the differences?

Introduction: When comparing Google Cloud Vision API, Tesseract OCR, and scanR for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tasks, it's essential to understand their key differences to make an informed decision.

Accuracy: Google Cloud Vision API utilizes powerful machine learning algorithms to achieve high accuracy in text recognition, making it suitable for complex documents and images. Tesseract OCR, an open-source OCR engine, provides decent accuracy but may require manual tuning for optimal results. scanR, on the other hand, offers reliable accuracy but may not be as robust as Google Cloud Vision API in handling diverse content formats.
Language Support: Google Cloud Vision API supports a wide range of languages, including less widely spoken languages, making it a versatile choice for multilingual OCR tasks. Tesseract OCR also offers excellent language support through language packs, while scanR may have limitations in recognizing less common languages and character sets.
Customization Options: Google Cloud Vision API provides customizable models for specific use cases, allowing users to train models with their own data for improved performance. Tesseract OCR offers customization through parameter tuning and training with new fonts, styles, or languages. scanR may not offer as extensive customization options as the other two platforms.
API Integrations: Google Cloud Vision API seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud services, providing a scalable and robust OCR solution for cloud-based applications. Tesseract OCR can be integrated into various programming languages and platforms, offering flexibility in deployment. scanR may have limited API integration capabilities compared to the other two options.

In Summary, understanding the key differences in accuracy, language support, customization options, and API integrations among Google Cloud Vision API, Tesseract OCR, and scanR is crucial for selecting the most suitable OCR solution for your specific requirements.

Advice on Tesseract OCR, scanR, Google Cloud Vision API

Vladyslav

Sr. Directory of Technology at Shelf

Oct 25, 2019

Decided

AWS Rekognition has an OCR feature but can recognize only up to 50 words per image, which is a deal-breaker for us. (see my tweet).

Also, we discovered fantastic speed and quality improvements in the 4.x versions of Tesseract. Meanwhile, the quality of AWS Rekognition's OCR remains to be mediocre in comparison.

We run Tesseract serverlessly in AWS Lambda via aws-lambda-tesseract library that we made open-source.

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Detailed Comparison

Tesseract OCR	scanR	Google Cloud Vision API
Tesseract was originally developed at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Bristol and at Hewlett-Packard Co, Greeley Colorado between 1985 and 1994, with some more changes made in 1996 to port to Windows, and some C++izing in 1998. In 2005 Tesseract was open sourced by HP. Since 2006 it is developed by Google.	scanR is a simple OCR API service that supports 32 languages and can extract text from images or PDF files.	Google Cloud Vision API enables developers to understand the content of an image by encapsulating powerful machine learning models in an easy to use REST API.
-	Real time image to text - post us your image and get a response with the text inside.; No need to manage servers or infrastructure, simply call our API and get the text inside any image.;	Powerful Image Analysis; Insight From Your Images; Detect Inappropriate Content; Image Sentiment Analysis; Extract Text
Statistics
GitHub Stars 70.7K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 10.4K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 95	Stacks 2	Stacks 134
Followers 286	Followers 44	Followers 276
Votes 7	Votes 0	Votes 16
Pros & Cons
Pros 5 Building training set is easy 2 Very lightweight library Cons 1 Works best with white background and black text	No community feedback yet	Pros 9 Image Recognition 7 Built by Google

What are some alternatives to Tesseract OCR, scanR, Google Cloud Vision API?

Amazon Rekognition

Amazon Rekognition is a service that makes it easy to add image analysis to your applications. With Rekognition, you can detect objects, scenes, and faces in images. You can also search and compare faces. Rekognition’s API enables you to quickly add sophisticated deep learning-based visual search and image classification to your applications.

Tesseract.js

This library supports over 60 languages, automatic text orientation and script detection, a simple interface for reading paragraph, word, and character bounding boxes. Tesseract.js can run either in a browser and on a server with NodeJS.

libpng

It is the official Portable Network Graphics (PNG) reference library. It is a platform-independent library that contains C functions for handling PNG images. It supports almost all of PNG's features, is extensible, and has been widely used and tested.

OpenJPEG

It is an open-source JPEG 2000 codec written in C language.

ZXing

It is a barcode scanning library for Java, Android. Decode a 1D or 2D barcode from an image on the web.

EasyOCR

It is ready-to-use OCR with 40+ languages supported including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai.

libjpeg

It is a free library for JPEG image compression.

Restb.ai

It tags, classifies, and organizes your real estate images.

Basilica

An API that embeds high-dimensional data like images and text. You send an image, and you back a vector of floats.

MMOCR

It is an open-source toolbox based on PyTorch and mmdetection for text detection, text recognition, and the corresponding downstream tasks including key information extraction.