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Google Cloud Vision API vs Tesseract OCR: What are the differences?
What is Google Cloud Vision API? Understand the content of an image by encapsulating powerful machine learning models. 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.
What is Tesseract OCR? Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine. 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.
Google Cloud Vision API and Tesseract OCR can be primarily classified as "Image Analysis API" tools.
Tesseract OCR is an open source tool with 27.8K GitHub stars and 5.31K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Tesseract OCR's open source repository on GitHub.
S.C. Galec, nurx, and intelygenz are some of the popular companies that use Google Cloud Vision API, whereas Tesseract OCR is used by Shelf, ESCHR, and DLabs. Google Cloud Vision API has a broader approval, being mentioned in 24 company stacks & 8 developers stacks; compared to Tesseract OCR, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.
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.
Pros of Google Cloud Vision API
- Image Recognition8
- Built by Google7
Pros of Tesseract OCR
- Building training set is easy4
- Very lightweight library1
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Cons of Google Cloud Vision API
Cons of Tesseract OCR
- Works best with white background and black text1