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Google Pushes Open Source OCR
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to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use.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.'"
Now that they will be able to recognize and tag our images, I wonder if Picassa will finally get increased storage. Google will be able to deliver targeted ads based on our pictures.
Use this line to checkout ocropus:
svn co http://ocropus.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ ocropus
The goal of the project is to stop the damn email image spammers.
among other things, sure, but it's got to be a high priority for google.
... for Captchas? If Google is pushing OCR I could see it eventually becoming good enough to parse at least some types of captchas.
The goal of the project is to ... deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis
So, will it work on documents written in crayon? It would be a tragic loss for Dubya's presidential documents to get lost in the sands of time. On the scale of the library of Alexandria. No, seriously.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
An OCR system that runs on Linux. I've been waiting for quite some time for something like this.
I've been hoping that someone with deep pockets (Google, IBM, Sun) would take on this area for a while.
There is a major need for an OSS OCR package, and right now the field is pretty bare. There's GOCR, and a commercial offering called OCRShop, and at least that I've run across, that's about it. Nothing really on par with Omnipage, or other commercial packages for other platforms.
I think there are some really neat applications for OCR that have never really been investigated, because it's so expensive to build that capability into other products. A free OCR engine that really worked could lead to some very neat book-scanning applications, just for starters. I don't think that there's really any integrated packages around for helping people scan books and manuscripts. (Right now you have to photograph the pages, keep them organized, then OCR them and proofread the text against the images. Bit of a nightmare.) I'd love to see a free application for libraries that let a user batch scan (via a digital camera -- let's not get into what I think of SANE and scanners generally) a book, and then provided a nice interface for proofreading the OCRed text against the original image.
Something like that could have a huge social impact. There are a lot of libraries where I'm sure they'd love to scan some of their out-of-copyright assets and provide them to patrons in a digital form, but it's just too technically complicated. An easy-to-use program that let the proofreading be done by nontechnical users (maybe remotely, as long as we're dreaming) could vastly increase the volume of digital materials available.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And of course, as a side effect they'll probably wind up with a lovely distributed system for solving captcha. ;)
True, but CAPTCHAs always seemed like a bit of an inelegant hack anyway. First, they're horrible from a disabled-access standpoint, and second they're really not all that effective against a concerted enemy when there's a lot of money on the line. Spammers can just pay a few kids in some Third World country to sit there all day and solve CAPTCHAs if they want to.
Since message boards, which are the major users of CAPTCHAs, are practically by design little fiefdoms, I don't think they're nearly as hard to patrol as a common-carrier network like email. The solution to message-board spam is to either institute a moderator-delay (for small blogs and boards), or simply make enough admins with IP-ban powers so that the second someone starts spamming, they get banned and the spam gets deleted. Lameness filters working on the same principles as email spam-filters are probably helpful, too.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Orcopus:
Level: 15
Race: Fell Marine
HP: 290/290
EP: 200/200
Water elemental
Drops: Tentacle
This'll be a much needed boost for us Linux users who want to help out Project Gutenburg.
Okay, so one thing will lead to another and soon Google will be creating technology to recognize non-symbol shapes... How long before I can login to my G-Accounts by smiling at my computer?
All you people who are worried about this breaking captchas seem to be missing something--there have been a number of fairly decent OCR packages out there for a long time. The goal of this Google project is to create an open-sourced one that does a good job deciphering HUMAN-READABLE TEXT. Captchas are far from human-readable (the good ones at least), and I seriously doubt this project will help very much in that arena.
This guy's the limit!
Captcha (warped text) will probably remain for a long time. This OCR has more practical uses when applied to text that is meant to be legible.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
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...
English only I suppose?
When we can make a computer that can tell the difference between a kitten and an adult cat (or hell even another furred mamal) with any kind of accuracy, I think the LEAST of your problems at that point is coming up with captchas. You should be more worried about how you're going to escape from Skynet.
Captchas are far from human-readable (the good ones at least), and I seriously doubt this project will help very much in that arena.
Um, the whole point of CAPTCHAS is that they are human-readable (albeit often not easily so) but not machine-readable.
Will I be able to search my comics strips (downloaded since ever) by keyword?
I would love that!
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
captcha's are not restricted to images of letters. For example: you could ask people to solve a regular text question (this would also fix accessibility issues)
If you're sick of image spam, you can do what I did. Add the OpenProtect channel to SpamAssassin and then add these line to your SpamAssassin config:
required_hits 5
score SARE_GIF_ATTACH 5
I don't see image spam any more. I resorted to that after I was getting a hundred or so of them a day.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Where have you been lately? Picasaweb.google.com has already increased from a mere 250MB to 1GB+ and counting!
Here's some other information you might need/want to build this software; note that I am on Ubuntu Feisty.
To build tesseract-ocr you must install autoconf.
If you are smart you will figure out a way to omit ocropus/data-test-pages from your checkout. Do you really want to use their pages to test? No! You want to use your own data.
I built with gcc 4.1.2, YMMV. Some people have reported errors trying to just compile tesseract.
to build ocropus I ended up installing jam, libaspell-dev and libtiff-dev.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Look, any illiterate kid in a third world country can play type-in-the CAPTCHA all day long. I think the solution is to put up an array of 9 or so pictures, and ask the reader to click on the kitten. The other 8 being something other than a kitten, and all the files having random names which rotate with every view. You could also change the item being asked for to defeat simple image recognition, and have several pictures of kittens/what-have-yous.
To defeat *this*, you would need someone with a greater command of the english language than simple recognition of characters, or very advanced image recogniion software. I wouldn't worry about the software anytime soon if you chose images carefully.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Just for you, I made one, because I'm that fucking cool.
Prepare to be unimpressed, because Results follow:
JABBERWOCKY Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872) `Twas bri11ig,_ andjghe 4s1it_hy toyes Digl gyre amid gimblejn thg wabe: All xiiimsy wei^e thg borogovgs, And theamome raths outigrabe. ''ggwqre thg Jalgbervvpck,_my sqn! The jaw; that bijtel the clayksathat catch! Bgyvaiie the Jubjub bird, anti shun The frumidus Bandersnatch!' I-Ie took his yorpal sword in hand: Long timg tlgewmangome foe he sought So rgSted he by the Tu_mtum tree, And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jalgbgjwoclg, with eyes of flame, Cqmgwhjfflixgg through fhe tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! Qne, two! One, two! And through and thIi`Ollgh The jrorpgal b]ade went; snicaker-snack! I-Ie left iifdead, and with its head He went galumphing back. ''And, has thou slain thejabbexfwpck? Cpmg to my a_rxps!_my ljgaxjgishboyl Ojralqjousi dwgy! Qalladhl Callayl' He chortled in his joy. S
\ A S
X A ?`^s :
, ' Was ga. ka%#* mm. -- M 1 1 Q at ) a iv 2. `Ail A it 3*,* `i 2 (V H ;. ````( * 4 ^Nq@ Eu..*s..%im X M is ? lgh ~ ``A? S [ A Fax I /),2*gE it ^`* 4 ~ *: ' X A mg x ix, ,t~;;;..: v' it ix '~ t ~ ^ ,4~ ---= =-^ A A i gv ; * XX, x> . . N S A ft 1 A-`A 3; `> ' ''YY \Jh ^***`(?i* , ~~ x `* at -;v- *<~ ' H ~~~-=.- ; `Twas bri11ig,_ and_the 4s1it_hy toyes Dig gyre arid gimblejn the wabe; All Qiixjnsy wei^e thq borogovgs, And thdmome raths outvgrabe.
dshaw@iabbenNockv.com
Return to Glorious Nonsense Return to Lewis Carroll
Results End.
Beautiful, eh? I also tried a 100 dpi grayscale scan, which came out even more like hash (one big paragraph) and a 300 dpi bitmap (1bpp) which was about the same as the 100 dpi gray scan in quality, though a bit better.
Looks like ocropus has a while to go before it can slay the Jabberwock instead of thejabbexfwpck.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is that a Chinese mispronunciation? ;)
One awesome application of this: I teach university courses that require term papers. If I could scan and upload the term papers I receive and Google could OCR them and tell me whether they're plagiarized (and of course Google would know; they know all!), I'd be prepared to pay them a bit of money for this. Or, more accurately, my university would be prepared to pay them a decent sum of money on my behalf. Then, they could keep the data from the term papers for the future, to make sure that nobody turns in that same paper in a later semester. Google not only gets money for this, but a whole lot of data to crawl through. Who knows what they would learn if a curious goog starts cleverly mining that data? If they do this, I would really love to work for them and use my 20% "downtime" to code a sentence structure analyzer that could predict a grade based just on syntactic features of the writing. In order to get more data, Google might even offer the OCR + plagiarism detection for free if the instructor agrees to use a Google grading and feedback system, so that Google could correlate each essay with a grade and an explanation of the grade. After tens of thousands of examples, Google might learn how to assign fairly accurate grades on its own (machine agrees with human to almost the same degree that humans agree with each other about what grade is deserved), and after that, who knows, Google might learn how to write B- term papers without any human input!
BTW, I am aware of plagiarism.org and their plagiarism-detection service which works like the thing that I want Google to do. Of course, if Google enters this market, they will crush all competition immediately, and plausibly, they'll do a better job because their database is just bigger. Also, Google could charge less, because a part of the payment will be access to the data itself. In fact, Google is already looking like it will accept information as payment for many of its services! And why not?
Actually, GOCR works very well (100%) on the image-based text that some sites use to prevent screen scrapping.
1. Download and save the image.
2. If it's a gif, convert it to a jpg.
gif2jpg -a tmp.gif
3. Reduce the colors to 2 (black & white).
djpeg -colors 2 -greyscale -dither none tmp.jpg tmp.pnm
4. If there is a border, crop it off.
pnmcut a b c d tmp.pnm > OCR.pnm
(The dimensions a,b,c,d can be determined by any tool that returns useful info about an image, in general remove 1 or 2 pixels from the edges to get rid of borders.)
5. OCR it.
gocr -n 1 OCR.pnm >> OCR.txt
Of course, this is all automated within the screen scraper, I just broke it out here to explain the steps.
For CAPTCHAs, you have to demorph the severely distorted images after step 4, before you OCR it. I'm still working on the demorpher, but it's about 50% accurate now. Basically, it unstretches long strings of pixels to the average of other strings of pixels in the x and y axis. Works even better if you determine the angle of the pixel sting and shrink on that, along with some rotation to the nearest x or y axis.