Batch Cataloging of Scanned Documents via OCR?

munwin99 asks: "I am looking for some software to process a batch of images (scanned forms). We want to use Gallery to view the images, and be able to search them by 3 or 4 attributes. We want to get these attributes from the form (date, name, etc). We want it to check a section of the scanned form, read the info from that section(s), and dump the retrieved info into Gallery (using OCR / ICR). Is there any (preferably) free or open source software that can do this? Supported OSes should include either Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. Even Gallery is optional, if someone has a better suggestion."

Comments

Custom Layout

[tonsofpcs]

Many pieces of OCR software allow you to create a 'layout' for OCRing, that is, specify where images and textual data are. If your forms all follow the same layout, or you have just a few [relatively], you can set up these layouts and, in many pieces of software, reuse them. The only cavet is that you need to be sure that the forms are scanned the same way; if your forms have prepunched holes or markings in specific points on the edge, you can use animation software [like Bauhaus Software's Mirage] on a batch to 'pixel-track' the pages and align them based upon these marks, then export no-/low-loss TGAs, TIFFs, PNGs, or similar for OCRing.

Open Source OCR

[SpinningAround]

I've been looking into OCR packages as part of a custom data capture work-flow desired by one of my customers.

The OCR / document image layout analysis world is dominated by a handful of commercial companies. There is a dearth of OCR and document analysis code available in the open source community. That which is available on any sort of 'free' basis is not going to be of a lot of use other than as a starting point for some serious development of your own, I would suggest.

The big names commercially are:

Abbyy's Finereader

Nuance's (formerly Scansoft) Omnipage

and then a number of smaller players like SimpleOCR

In the open source world, some places to start looking are:

GOCR

and GNU's OCRAD

Both Nuance and Abbyy offer an SDK for OCR integration at a code level which might suit depending on your budget. Certainly the price (probably between $500 and $5000 for a license) represent a good deal if you look at the costs and time it would take to write anything that does serious OCR work yourself.

BTW, if anyone out there knows of any good document layout analysis code available to have a look at, I would be particularly interested. I am looking into document layout analysis for a personal project and although there is a fair bit of academic research available at Citeseer, I actually haven't found much in the way of good sample code that I can use as a starting point for some of my own ideas.

You Get What You Pay For

[Flwyd]

My job involves integrating with OCR, and we've looked at quite a few options. Though there are some bargains, you get what you pay for.

The big players are Abbyy and Scansoft. Both have extensive feature lists, from handy GUIs to form/document layout to Asian language support. They also come with a hefty price tag. Their Windows support is best, but they have software for others. Single user applications are reasonably priced in the two-digit figure range. However, we decided not to integrate with either of them in part because of the price tag for high volume server-side processing. If you only have a hundred or two forms to do at a time, a workstation solution may be your best bet.

We chose to integrate with Transym, a cheap but pretty good engine. It does a good job at what it tries to do, which is recognize standard printed text. We then take that text and extract meaningful data, like dates and names, from the output text + position information. Pretty much every other cheap/free package we looked at had pretty lousy performance on our straight-forward documents (primarily typed paragraphs).

ICR (recognizing handwriting) and IMR (mark recognition) is another bag. There are very few players in this arena. They work best when the domain is well-defined (the U.S. Postal Service, for instance, does pretty well at recognizing zip codes). If you're trying to recognize dates and check boxes, the form definition software that Abbyy and Scansoft provide probably fits your needs best.

Finally, you need to consider how reliable you want your process to be and how much quality control you want. Even the best OCR engine makes errors, and ICR is quite a bit behind that. You can't blindly trust OCR output unless you're willing to deal with incomplete data. If you're going to have a human verify the computer's work for only a few fields, you may not be gaining significant efficiency.

(I don't claim to have evaluated every potential option. There may be software we missed, software we didn't evaluate because it didn't meet our integration needs, and software that's come to light after we did our search.)

Abbyy Finereader

[jukervin]

I would reccommend taking a look of Abbyy's offerings. Particulary FormReader 6.5 Family which is intented for OCRing forms and semi-structured documents.

http://www.abbyy.com/formreader/

scansnap and spotlight

[austad]

Not sure what you're doing, but this might give you some ideas. I scan all of my papers docs in using a Fujitsu ScanSnap in OSX. It can automatically pipe them to ReadIris Pro for OCR, and dump them in a save directory. I can search for whatever I want in spotlight, and it pops right up. "Hennepin county property tax 2002" bring up one document, and putting in my address and the words "purchase agreement" comes up with the purchase agreement for my house.

It's pretty insane how much time it saves me.