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Google Pushes Open Source OCR

Posted by Zonk on from the google-has-taken-all-knowledge-to-be-its-provice dept.

SocialWorm writes "Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will 'advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies.' OCRopus will be available under the Apache 2.0 License. Obviously, there may be search and image search implications from OCRopus. 'The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use. In addition, we are structuring the system in such a way that it will be easy to reuse by other researchers in the field.'"

3 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. searchable pdfs by radarsat1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anyone know of an open source utility that can convert scanned image-based PDF files into searchable PDFs ?
    (Extra points if it somehow re-generates the actual file so it looks nice instead of pixelated.)

    Perhaps this library could be used to build such an application if none exists...

  2. Language? by ceeam · · Score: 4, Interesting

    English only I suppose?

  3. Re:Small price if it helps email spam. by Pxtl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You've obviously never fought off a bb spammer. They don't use one or two accounts to spam one or two messages - they inundate the board from a long list of IPs. Even without spamming messages, they create hordes of accounts just for the pagerank provided by the links within their personal account pages. Plus, admin-approval-delays degrade quality for the user. It creates a huge headache all around to handle maintaining banlists and cleaning out garbage.

    Captchas are by far the better solution.

    The problem is that, long term, they will eventually be cracked. I'm imagining the ultimate solution will only be to allow users with email addresses from "approved" major ISPs.