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Google Adds OCR To PDF and Images
Kilrah_il writes "Now you have the option to OCR every PDF and image you upload to Google Docs. 'When you upload files to Google Docs, you'll notice a new option that tells Google to convert the text from PDF and image files to Google Docs documents. ... I've tried to convert an excerpt from the book Rework and the result wasn't great. About 10% of the text has been incorrectly converted and the formatting hasn't been preserved.'"
I know with several services, like Google Voice, they had a link or checkbox to indicate that "this transcription is lousy, I can do better" with an option to do so, which was presumably sent back to improve the service. It really seemed to work, too, the quality of Google Voice's voicemail-to-text transcriptions started off horrible, and has since become awesome. Same goes for the built-in speech-to-text in Android. If Google includes something like that here to tune whatever machine learning algos they're using, I have no doubt it will rapidly progress to a usable state.
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I've just tried with the extract.
The text extraction seams to have worked well. Unsurprisingly the formatting has been lost and it has got confused with the REwork type bits. PDFs are not designed with extraction to a editable format in mind, so getting any of the formatting is impressive in my book.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
I don't know for sure what's running behind this, but Google's OCRopus is Apache, as is the actual OCR engine behind it, tesseract.
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About 10% of the text has been incorrectly converted and the formatting hasn't been preserved.
What did you expect? I've been in the legal field for 10 years and have seen OCR progress substantially during that time. However, 10% error rate is still very common with scanned docs and unless you are looking at the original image, all the formatting is lost. This is with the best OCR engines in the industry!
Maybe you should actually know something about the particular field before you judge?
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I am pretty sure that with recatpcha only one of the two words you type in is unknown.
So if I have some text that looks like 'first known) p0sh bi4ches'.
Captcha user one will get "first p0sh".
If they correctly identify first, then I will accept their reading of posh, say "post".
User 2 gets "p0sh b14ches"
If they correctly identify "p0sh" as post, then I will accept their reading of "bi4ches".
Obviously the guys at recaptcha has done a better job than my simplified & poor explanation. You need "some" knowledge of what the text actually is, but only some.
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