The main problem in dealing with camera images will be the distortion of text near the binding — assuming you can hold the camera in an appropriate position and light the work adequately.
I'm not sure what you mean by industry standard software, what you've tried or what operating system you are using. I haven't tried any recent version of OmniPage.I downloaded a trial version of Abby FineReader for Mac but was unimpressed with its accuracy — it was not as good as the free OCR program Tesseract. PDF OCR on the Mac uses Tesseract; there is a (free) community edition and a Professional Edition.
On the Windows platform I've tried programs that use Microsoft's OCR (which is said to be a licensed older version of OmniPage). It does not perform as well as Tesseract. It has a particular tendency to miss out entire words in otherwise correctly recognised text.
The main issue with Tesseract is that it can have difficulty with light text on a dark background.
The best OCR I have come across, by some margin, is TextSniper on the Mac. However, it works by taking a screenshot of an image displayed on the computer screen and copying the text to the clipboard. It does not provide the PDF output you require. It can OCR accurately text that Tesseract cannot recognise at all, including light on dark and text on patterned backgrounds. However, it is completely thrown by drop caps which Tesseract handles without issue.
Tesseract has an unusual history. It was originally developed by Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, but work stopped in about 1998. Much more recently it was acquired by Google and made open source. It needs to be at least version 4; 3 is much less accurate. In its native state it is a command line program that produces a text file from an image. I'm not aware of any program on Windows that uses Tesseract and produces PDF output, but there may be one I'm not aware of.
I'm not sure what you mean by industry standard software, what you've tried or what operating system you are using. I haven't tried any recent version of OmniPage.I downloaded a trial version of Abby FineReader for Mac but was unimpressed with its accuracy — it was not as good as the free OCR program Tesseract. PDF OCR on the Mac uses Tesseract; there is a (free) community edition and a Professional Edition.
On the Windows platform I've tried programs that use Microsoft's OCR (which is said to be a licensed older version of OmniPage). It does not perform as well as Tesseract. It has a particular tendency to miss out entire words in otherwise correctly recognised text.
The main issue with Tesseract is that it can have difficulty with light text on a dark background.
The best OCR I have come across, by some margin, is TextSniper on the Mac. However, it works by taking a screenshot of an image displayed on the computer screen and copying the text to the clipboard. It does not provide the PDF output you require. It can OCR accurately text that Tesseract cannot recognise at all, including light on dark and text on patterned backgrounds. However, it is completely thrown by drop caps which Tesseract handles without issue.
Tesseract has an unusual history. It was originally developed by Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, but work stopped in about 1998. Much more recently it was acquired by Google and made open source. It needs to be at least version 4; 3 is much less accurate. In its native state it is a command line program that produces a text file from an image. I'm not aware of any program on Windows that uses Tesseract and produces PDF output, but there may be one I'm not aware of.
Statistics: Posted by dr_d_gee — Fri Mar 15, 2024 5:28 pm