Google Cloud Vision API vs Tesseract OCR

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Google Cloud Vision API

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Tesseract OCR

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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.

Decisions about Google Cloud Vision API and Tesseract OCR
Vladyslav Holubiev
Sr. Directory of Technology at Shelf · | 1 upvote · 38.7K views

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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Pros of Google Cloud Vision API
Pros of Tesseract OCR
  • 8
    Image Recognition
  • 7
    Built by Google
  • 4
    Building training set is easy
  • 1
    Very lightweight library

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Cons of Google Cloud Vision API
Cons of Tesseract OCR
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    • 1
      Works best with white background and black text

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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Google Cloud Vision API?

    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 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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Google Cloud Vision API?
    What companies use Tesseract OCR?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Google Cloud Vision API or Tesseract OCR.
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    What are some alternatives to Google Cloud Vision API and Tesseract OCR?
    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.
    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.
    See all alternatives