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scanR vs Tesseract OCR: What are the differences?
scanR: API to detect text in images, built for developers. scanR is a simple OCR API service that supports 32 languages and can extract text from images or PDF files; 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.
scanR and Tesseract OCR belong to "Image Analysis API" category of the tech stack.
Tesseract OCR is an open source tool with 28.1K GitHub stars and 5.38K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Tesseract OCR's open source repository on GitHub.
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 scanR
Pros of Tesseract OCR
- Building training set is easy5
- Very lightweight library2
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Cons of scanR
Cons of Tesseract OCR
- Works best with white background and black text1
