Where Did Affordable OCR Go?

Goeland86 asks: "Has OCR (Optical Character Recognition) died down? Where have all the magical programs that translate your handwriting to office compatible files gone? Most of the windows programs nowadays are either expensive (ReadIris Pro 9 about $400) and not that many OSS projects for OCR have released a recent update (Kognition was last updated on July 17th 2003 according to Freshmeat). Has everyone already scanned/translated all of their paper files? Has OCR outlived its use, or is it just a fancy technology that hit a dead end in terms of the market? Have Slashdot readers used it? If so, are you still using it? If not, why?"

Comments

Blatant lack of research.

[GoRK]

I usually don't post replies like this, but this question is ridiculously underresearched. OCR is a hard problem. Sure, a OSS alternative would be nice, but until a solution matures, when you really need OCR you need it because it's generally unreasonable either from a time standpoint or a budget standpoint to any alternative. That is why people pay for software sometimes.

TextBridge, PaperPort, and a host of other entry level programs are available for windows under a $100 price point. Generally if you buy a decent scanner (ie not a $50 piece of crap), you'll get some software capable of doing OCR bundled for free.

Higher-end OCR packages with better accuracy, more features, etc. often cost quite a bit more. OmniPage Pro is a decent package for only slightly more than $100. ReadIris is a really good program, and is reportedly very quick in comparison to some of the others. I imagine this is the reason that it costs $400.

There are document management packages out there that have very good OCR integrated that cost a hell of a lot more than $400. Trust me, though, if you're looking at the time or cost of converting a few thousand pages of data into editible text documents, a program that costs even $400 should be a steal.

paperless office , ocr rant, etc. long

[tweedlebait]

(I'm in the document imaging / conversion industry)

The term paperless office is considered a joke, and the funny part of it is this: as soon as someone looks up a document in their doc management system they just print it. Even if just to glance at! Copier/printer companies are thrilled!

There are megatons of paper and microfilm out there left to ocr and process. It's considered a pretty fast growing industry, although stunted recently after the bomb and more by the economy.

Having ocr'd images is very handy. Here's an open secret though-- Image+ hidden text pdf.
--Searchable, you have the original doc just as it looked, and the ocr errors don't make such an impact. It's easy to throw into a search engine and the prints look great, and small (b+w use tiff group iv, and jpeg for color jbig is not quite mature yet and only a few apps from cvision do a great job at it)

Anyway, since people just hit print as soon as they find their doc in a system those file cabinets we tried so hard to empty and organize re fill magically.

Also, scanning and setting up an edms (electonic doc managemnt system) is considered a luxury. business move slow with luxury items and usually get to reap the benefits of more mature software and systems (but this is NOT always true!).

Many other slow tech adoption business are just discovering scanning ocr and doc management. Litigation is a great example. xerox was doing quite a few tv ads recently touting that stuff.

The state of ocr itself is strange. There has been a sort of pleague in that industry of 'weird innovation' for years and many buyouts or companys changing the focus of their ocr product to another industry (like web or xml). Even the small office versions ($500 range) are not geared for any sort of reasonable volume or speed without crashing and burning, and usually designed to be babysat. Using these apps leaves the user with a really bad experience. For those not familliar the process goes something like this for a 200 page b+w document:
==
Scan (or import but import is usually crippled)

gaze at loads of memory hogging eye candy (this is what your upgrade bought you usually)

wait

correct skew (wait for crappy tools)
(possibly reboot from crash)

recognize page -slower with each new version even
when hardware is so much faster every year. some recognition is improved in some packages. Some of the latest i've tested take over 15 sec and sometimes over 45 sec per page!
(crash!?)
Correct errors / tune learning engine. (sometimes i swear this effort of teaching goes straight to NULL)

repeat 199 times

Now since you're locked in your desk and finished scanning now it's time to export! (like i didn't know what formats i wanted before i sat down.)

So it chews and chews and maybe crashes causing you to repeat all the above steps. Also note that most of these apps keep all the pages pretty much uncompressed in memory, then create a copy of them in memory for your desired output format. (crash)

2 days of work gone.

====
Most users walk away with the feeling of 'Yikes! all I wanted was a word doc of this. I'll just do something else'

For the home and also small biz market here are some of the 'weird innovations'--
===========
typereader 5 -- pretty good app! doesn't do image+hidden text pdf though. Pitty. has a batch file import and reasonable priced in the $100 range. nice and fast with good results

Typereader 6 and up- file import feature moved to industrial version lots of eye candy less stable minor improvement in recog and a bunch of other silly limits & slow

Omnipage same thing only it's never been great for over 50 pages. horrid workflow and crashes like crazy. very unpredictable!
Omnipage version 3 was better in many ways than omnipage 14. (lightning fast on today's equipment too :)

abby finereader - very slow but great recognition, more stable but lame workflow-