Google Releases Tesseract as Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "Google recently released Tesseract as open source. Originally developed at the HP Labs from 1985-1995, it has been touted as one of the most accurate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs available. Having sat on the shelf gathering dust for so many years, Google cleaned up some of the more outdated portions of the code and released it for general consumption. You can download Tesseract over at Sourceforge.

Comments

I take back every bad thing I said about Google

[OrangeTide]

HOORAY! Good free OCR software is in short supply. I wonder if this will have a positive impact on Project Gutenberg?

Hosting

[truthsearch]

Is there any particular reason google isn't hosting the project themselves?

NFB owns you

[tepples]

CATCHAs have been very effective in stopping spammers in the past, but if they can now just read them and answer correctly, then they are effectively rendered useless ...

They're already useless if installing one will subject your business to boycotts and/or lawsuits from National Federation of the Blind and other advocates for people with disabilities.

Un-Finishable

[Kadin2048]

In all honesty, I doubt Project Gutenberg will have run out of pre-1923 books by the time that new stuff starts coming out of Copyright under the new rules. They have everything written by humanity before that date to digitize: not just English language books and "classics," but government documents, records, foreign language texts, ancient manuscripts ... everything. That's as close to an un-finishable task as you can set yourself, I think.

Just assuming that somehow they did manage to digitize everything that was out of copyright, then I think what they should do is start archiving everything that they can. Even if they can't disseminate the information, they could still scan documents in and store them for later OCR-ing, thus preserving them against deterioration. I think this would be covered by fair use law even if the work was still protected. Perhaps this sort of archival work is not exactly the aim of PG, but it's still critically important.

With that said, I don't mean to in any way excuse the disgusting abuse of our political and legal system that was and is the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act." That thing is a disgusting example of pretty much everything that's wrong with our government today.

I call bullshit

[quigonn]

The very first CAPTCHA implementation was broken, but the funny thing about CAPTCHAs is that it's absolutely no effort to make an image completely unreadable for current OCR software. And even if one certain implementation is broken, just add another layer of distortion. Human brain is capable of coping with it, OCR software usually is not.

And after all, it's not about authentication, it's about making a service accessible only for humans.

BTW, it's funny that you praise your own cryptography solution in your blog, but it's obvious that you have the problem of replay attacks, you even mention it in the "caveat" section below the text box.