Cuneiform Ocr Software
This conversion is named Optical Character Recognition or OCR for short, and it can convert scanned books and documents into editable text, to get editable text from PDFs created via scanning, or even get text from screenshots and images. There are a variety of tools available for character recognition and some of them are free to use. This article will help you find and choose between several free OCR tools.
Note: this article was last updated on June 18th, 2013. This update added a host of additional tools that offer free OCR functionality, many of these we found through reader comments, so thank you for helping us make this article better. Online OCR services vs. Desktop OCR software Selecting the right OCR tool depends on your specific needs.
- If you have an image with text and you need to use text from that image or to modify it, you need to use an OCR software. Cognitive OpenOCR (Cuneiform).
- Explore 45 apps like CuneiForm. ABBYY FineReader is an OCR software that provides unmatched text recognition accuracy and conversion capabilities.
Cuneiform ocr free download. Linux-Intelligent-Ocr-Solution Linux-intelligent-ocr-solution Lios is a free and open source software for converting print in.
Generally OCR tools can be divided into two – online services and desktop software, both of them have their positive and negative sides. Online services will require that you upload your files on the internet to their servers, so there may be privacy concerns as well as time/bandwidth concerns if your document is big. Most have limits to file size and count of pages to process daily/weekly that they will process for free; for bigger jobs they require to buy extra processing power. On the flip side, many of these services are really good at the OCR itself.
With Desktop Software you don’t need to worry about uploading sensitive information to foreign servers, or whether your file will take too long to upload. Some desktop software programs generally give better text review options, and some have scanning functionality integrated. A note on comparing OCR software: OCR programs are not mainstream applications so there is only a limited number of freeware titles available, unlike for example hundreds of media players or file managers. In this article we aimed to provide the complete list of items found and evaluated at the present moment. This is because OCR results tend to vary; the accuracy of different OCR solutions depends on the quality, file format and fonts used in the source documents. For instance some programs provide better quality with typewriter fonts and worse results with screen fonts whereas other program perform exactly the opposite. We therefore shied away from a head-to-head comparison of OCR accuracy in this article as the rating can be unjust for the specific files you might need to process.
There is some general information about getting good OCR result. We looked sat three ‘types’ of OCR tools: online OCR services, desktop OCR programs and other software (mostly screenshot taking programs that have an OCR component). All of the tools mentioned are either FREE or have a free version. Quick links: click to jump to our and. Also, see our recommendations for. Part 1: Online OCR software Online OCR software is available through the web browser and you don’t have to install new software on your computer.
All you need is to get the image file using scanner or a digital photo camera, upload it through the online OCR web page and wait for the processed file to download. Although most of the online OCR providers claim that data will be automatically deleted from their servers still the files travel through internet so for sensitive information you may consider desktop software from. If you use Gmail or other Google online services you might try first.
Google Docs is not a dedicated OCR tool but it provides the OCR power Google uses to digitize books and process PDFs for their search engine. To get text from image or PDF files you need to first upload and convert the files to Google Docs. Then you can do the further editing online or/and download it back as PDF, DOC, TXT etc.
Click the Upload button first thing to upload your files, then select Settings from the menu and check ‘Convert uploaded files to Google docs format’ and ‘Convert text from uploaded PDF and images files’, then click Upload/Files. Another way is to check ‘Confirm settings before each upload’ after clicking Upload/Settings so that every time you upload a file you are asked whether you want to convert the file or leave it intact. This gives also an option to select which language dictionary will be used in the text recognition process. The file is therefore converted to Google Docs document having both the original image(s) and the converted text within it. You can review the text and delete the original images afterwards. Google Docs conversion works pretty good, especially with English texts. Over 30 different languages can be selected but if your language is not included in the list, the conversion may give an error and the file will not be processed at all.
Of course – if you don’t have a Google account you can create one any time. However, there are some limitations – the maximum size for images (.jpg,.gif,.png) and PDF files (.pdf) is 2 MB. For PDF files, they only look at the first 10 pages when searching for text to extract. Input image file types: most bitmap formats. Input PDF files: yes. Output file types: ODT, PDF, TXT, RTF, DOC, HTML. Languages: 30+.
Free Online OCR / PROS: CONS: No capacity limits for processing Only English dictionary supported. Text in other languages may be not recognized Keeps original formatting and layout Only first 30 pages of each PDF document is converted (it is possible to split bigger files by some online and other tools) No registration needed 3.
Free OCR is on online OCR service using Tesseract OCR engine. Input image file types: JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP. Input PDF files: yes. Output file types: plain text, copy-paste. Languages: 25+.
I2OCR / PROS: CONS: No limits for uploading Only text output; all the original formatting will be lost. Though at least it supports multi column pages correctly. Has a review option after character recognition – the original image and result text is shown side-by-side on screen Creates “hard” line-breaks at the end of each line. No registration needed Does not process PDF files.
Ability to process the result using Bing/Google translator 5. Input image file types: JPG, PNG, GIF. Input PDF files: yes. Output file types: TXT, PDF, DOC (?).
Languages: 7. OCRonline / PROS: CONS: Excellent recognition quality Registration needed Rebuilds original formatting Limited upload capacity – 5 pages in a week; file size up to 10 MB. Need to pay to get extra pages. Impressive list of 150 OCR languages 7.
Input image file types: JPG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, GIF. Input PDF files: only for registered users.
Output file types: DOC, XLS, TXT (+ PDF for registered users). Languages: 30+ Note: There is registered and guest mode available for this site. In guest mode 15 images per hour can be processed and maximum file size is 4 MB. There are some extra possibilities in registered mode, like uploading larger images, ZIP archives and multi-page PDFs. Initial credits after registering is for converting 20 pages.
Online OCR / PROS: CONS: Supports some languages that other servers do not support Limited upload capacity. Extra capacity may be purchased or earned by bonus program Preview the result text Registration needed for some functionality Retains formatting in DOC output; even tables Our Recommendation: The last word on online OCR services From the online OCR solutions reviewed above, provided good and stable OCR accuracy with a number of different fonts and texts. Unfortunately the free service is limited by 5 pages per week. If you need more capacity, try the other providers as they also may give good results depending on your source text. Part 2: Desktop OCR software Desktop software you need to download and install to your computer, and they usually have more configurable options than online tools.
Also you do not need to worry about sending sensitive information to the internet. Some desktop programs include the ability to acquire image directly from a scanner so they select good settings for scanning and you don’t need to use other programs to scan and save files.
OpenOCR is based on commercial product Cuneiform that was released as freeware on 2007. The download link to English version has moved. License: freeware. Input image: most bitmap file formats. Input PDF: no. Scanner input: yes.
Output: TXT, RTF, HTML + output to Word/Excel. Dictionary languages: 20+. FreeOCR / PROS: CONS: Tesseract OCR engine has good accuracy. Only text output; no formatting recognition 10. Free OCR to Word software is a simple and basic functionality OCR program which also has a clone named.
They only differ by the name, logo and adware included, but the adware setup can be declined on installation. License: freeware (RelevantKnowledge adware included but its installation can be skipped). Requires: –.
Input PDF: no. Dictionary languages: only English?. Scanner input: yes. Input image: major image file types like PNG, PSD, ICO, JPG, JPEG, TIFF etc. Output: TXT, DOC. Free OCR to Word / PROS: CONS: Simple interface No formatting recognition No PDF and multi-page file support Text language can not be set 11.
GImageReader is one of the front-ends to the free Tesseract OCR engine. You need to download and install Tesseract separately from. Tesseract engine uses OpenOffice dictionaries and spellcheckers that can be downloaded from. License: freeware (GNU).
Requires: Tesseract, need to download separately. Input PDF: yes. Dictionary languages: many, uses freely downloadable OpenOffice spellcheckers. Scanner input: yes. Input image: JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF.
Output: TXT. GImageReader / PROS: CONS: Tesseract OCR engine has good accuracy Only text output; no formatting recognition OCR area(s) can be manually selected Installation of additional languages can be a bit complicated 12. Puma.NET is actually not a user solution but a development kit based on CuneiForm OCR engine, though it contains a sample program with the front-end.
After installing there will be no launch icon in Start Menu but you can find the program Puma.Net.Sample.exe deep in the C: Program Files Puma.NET Sample bin x86 Debug folder. License: freeware (BSD).
Requires: Microsoft.NET. Input image: BMP, GIF, EXIG, JPG, PNG and TIFF. Input PDF: no. Scanner input: no. Output: TXT, RTF, HTML.
Dictionary languages: 27. SimpleOCR / PROS: CONS: Word by word text revision Only 3 languages dictionary. Ability to train the engine to use specific fonts No font and format detection Includes both single file and batch of files processing mode Our Recommendation: The last word on desktop OCR software From the desktop OCR software reviewed above provided good accuracy with different fonts including artistic. Having said that, most of the programs performed also good processing text with simple fonts. Part 3: Other OCR software There are some more free tools available, which are mainly meant for more specific tasks but can be used for text recognition. You can find a good PDF viewer or a screen capture software for everyday use and OCR capabilities at the same time. PDF-XChange is a PDF viewer and PDF composer which has also OCR capabilities supporting more than 35 input languages.
With PDF-XChange it is possible to get text from PDFs, like scanned images, where You can not search and select text for copy-paste. Open the PDF file with PDF-XChange and take Document/OCR page from the menu, then it is possible to search OCR-d text and select the text with Select tool and copy it to another application. In the free version it is possible to save the PDF with recognized text but the watermarks will be added.
It is possible to get text from image files by creating new PDF file from the images, then performing OCR. Again – in the free version watermarks will be added if you save the PDF, so use copy-paste on the text areas to get unformatted text output. License: free. Input image: TIFF, JPG, BMP etc. Input PDF: yes. Output: text (copy-paste).
Dictionary languages: 30+. PROS: CONS: Good recognition quality The files are sent to online OCR server so there may be privacy issues. Restores formatting (however no good results with tables) Can be used as an good PDF viewer 16. ABBYY Screenshot Reader is a screen capture software that can do screenshot OCR on the fly. Excellent recognition quality, amazing number of 160+ input languages can be selected, also multiple languages at a time. It can nicely handle data tables. ABBYY Screenshot Reader is reviewed.
License: free. Input image: screen (area, window, whole screen).
Input PDF: no. Output: text, table, image. Dictionary languages: 180+.
PROS: CONS: Good for processing multiple files The files are sent to online OCR server so there may be privacy issues. About OCR and how to get better results OCR is used to turn printed books and documents back to text. OCR tools analyze the image, recognizes the characters/words and output them in form of editable text file.
The character recognition is never perfect. By some studies the accuracy of the commercial OCR products vary from 70 – 98% and total accuracy can be achieved only with the help of human review. To improve accuracy most OCR tools also use dictionaries. Instead of recognizing individual characters they try to recognize whole words that exist in the selected dictionary. Some OCR software cannot detect fonts and formatting and can only give plain text as output. You then need to reapply all the formatting manually.
But some of the OCR engines detect fonts like bold and italic, some of them also detect paragraph formatting, multiple columns, tables and images inside the text, so they can use this information to replicate the text in editable format like DOC, HTML etc. The source for character recognition can be an image obtained by scanner, digital camera or screenshot. If you use a scanner and you have lot of pages you might use OCR software that has scanner support built in. The program then suggests the settings that give best results for OCR.
Usually this means 300 dpi resolution (200 dpi minimal) and gray-scale JPG or TIFF image. Some software like color images better than gray-scale, though. So if you do not get best results it is recommended to try several settings, like 300 dpi color JPEG and 300 dpi gray-scale JPG. Or TIFF instead of JPG.
Getting decent OCR results using images taken by digital camera is quite difficult. Good light, no flash, straight paper, macro mode etc help to get better results as it is described for instance in.
It is also possible to get text from screenshot files but it also needs some extra measures. Usually the resolution of a screenshot is 72 dpi but OCR needs at least 200 dpi. Some OCR programs can automatically adjust the resolution of the image file, but for others you need to use some image manipulation program to convert the resolution to at least 200 dpi. For screenshots it is best to have dedicated screen capture programs that have built-in OCR functionality like,.
OCR is often used to process PDF files. A PDF usually consists of images that are shown on screen and also the source text that you can select for copy-paste. But some of the PDFs contain only images, like scanned PDF files. Usual “” type software often cannot process these files. To extract text from PDF files that contain only images you need a viewer that can do OCR like or some OCR software that accepts PDF files for input.
Although it isn’t free, another common tool is OneNote in Office 2007 and 2010. It incorporates OCR. Paste an image into OneNote, right click, and select the “Extract Text” option.
It only captures text, not formatting. OneNote replaces MODI as OCR tool although there are techniques for getting downloading MODI into 2007 or 2010. On HowToGeek site, referring to this page, there is a comment about 2007 / 2010 Word providing OCR.
I would really like to hear more about that. I, and several other “experts” I’m in contact have never mentioned OCR in Word.
Hi, while it is not free, Abbyy Screenshot Reader is only about $10, it works superbly. I use it even on google books and archive.org frequently, also PDFs without an easy copy facility. (All done for fair use extracts, without having to type in many paragraphs.) The quality of the OCR of course varies with strange fonts, small text, etc but for normal text it is superb, since Abbyy knows their stuff and has lots of more sophisticated products for other purposes (which I have not needed at all). About 3 years ago I bought it and it has been the best $10 purchase, by far. This is really an informative article, I came across a nice.
I hope you guys are going to like it. Here are some details Aspose.OCR for Java is a character recognition component that allows developers to add OCR functionality in their Java web applications, web services and Windows applications. It provides a simple set of classes for controlling character recognition tasks. It helps developers to work with image files from within their Java applications. It allows developers to extract text from images, Read font, style information quickly, saving time & effort involved in developing an OCR solution from scratch.
Thanks for your suggestion. They are great. I heard of them before, but I did not use it.
I am using Yunmai Document Recognition, a document reader developed by Yunmai Technology. It is able to extract the text from an image of a document, and then save it as text file. This software is a demo of Yunmai Document Recognition OCR SDK. The average time for recognition of a document less than 6 seconds. The recognition accuracy can reach 99%.
It can convert documents into PDF, Word, Text format files.
1.1 / April 19, 2011; 6 years ago ( 2011-04-19) Written in and / Website CuneiForm Cognitive OpenOCR is a freely distributed open source OCR system developed by Russian software company. CuneiForm OCR was developed by Cognitive Technologies as a commercial product in 1993. The system came with the most popular models of scanners, MFPs and software in Russia and the rest of the world.
Corel Draw, Hewlet-Pachard, Epson, Xerox, Samsung, Brother, Mustek, OKI, Canon, Olivetti, etc. In 2008 Cognitive Technologies opened the program’s source codes. Besides, the system supports a mixture of Russian and English. Recognition of other mixed languages is only supported in the branch, developed by Andrei Borovsky in 2009. Educating the system to recognize other languages is difficult since each language is related to a dat-file, the structure and development method of which are not disclosed by the developers. History 1993 - Cognitive Technologies signed an OEM-contract with, under the terms which Cognitive recognition library came embedded into the (and later versions) package popular in the publishing sphere. 1994 – The contract with Hewlett-Packard on the equipment of all scanners imported into Russia with CuneiForm OCR.
This was the first HP contract with a Russian software company. 1995 - The contract with the Japanese corporation Epson on supplying their scanners with the CuneiForm OCR. The OEM contract was signed with the world's largest manufacturer of fax machines, laser printers, scanners and other office equipment - Brother Corporation.
According to the agreement, the new roller scanner Brother IC-150 was equipped with Cognitive software for scanning and recognition worldwide. 1996 - OEM agreement with one of the world's largest manufacturers of monitors, fax machines, laser printers, MFPs and other office equipment - Samsung Information Systems America. According to the agreement the new multifunction device Samsung OFFICE MASTER OML-8630A was to be equipped with the Cognitive Cuneiform LE system of symbol optical recognition worldwide. OEM agreement with a leading global manufacturer of office equipment Xerox on equipping the multifunctional devices Xerox 3006 and Pro-610 with the CuneiForm recognition system.
CuneiForm '96 OCR release, with the first adaptive recognition algorithms in the world. Adaptive Recognition - a method based on a combination of two types of printed character recognition algorithms: multifont and omnifont. The system generates an internal font for each input document based on well printed characters using a dynamic adjustment (adaptation) to the specific input symbols. Thus, the method combines the omnitude and the technological efficiency of the omnifont approach with the high font recognition accuracy that dramatically improves the recognition rate. 1997 – The first usage of neural network-based technologies in CuneiForm.
The algorithms using neural networks for character recognition are developed as follows: the character image that is to be recognized (pattern) is reduced to a certain standard size (normalized). The luminance values of the normalized pattern are used as input parameters for the neural network. The number of output parameters of the neural network is equal to the number of recognized characters. The result of recognition is a symbol, which corresponds to the maximum value of the output vector of the neural network. New OEM agreement with Canon equipping multi-function devices imported into Russia with the CuneiForm system;.
New OEM contract with OKI Europe Limited on equipping MFPs OKI FAX 4100 and OKI FAX 5200 MFD’s, imported into Russia with the CuneiForm system;. The first CuneiForm MMX Update OCR-system for Intel MMX processor release;. NeuHause scanners come with the CuneiForm recognition system;. Russia's first network scanning system CuneiForm 98 NEST release. 1999.
Cuneiform Ocr Linux
New OEM contract with the Olivetti company on supplying the multi-function devices imported into Russia with the CuneiForm system;. Distribution agreement with a leading European distributor of software company WSKA (France) on the distribution of OCR Cuneiform Direct in Europe;. New version of the system released, Cuneiform 2000, that implements the method of 'cognitive analysis TM”: an expert system is integrated into the recognition core, which analyses of alternatives to the estimates on the output from each detection algorithm, and choose the best option. The method of 'Meridian table segmentation TM' is developed for the improvement of the accuracy of recreating the original form of the table in the output document;. The original document form recreation mechanism - 'What you scan is what you get TM' is introduced. The technology was aimed at saving the scanned document’s original form in terms of its components placement. This particularly important for the documents with complex topology: multicolumn texts with headings, annotations, graphic illustrations, tables, etc.
2001 - OEM-contract with Canon on its scanners and multifunction devices equipment with Cognitive Technologies CuneiForm OCR software for Eastern Europe Development prospects. December 12, 2007 OCR CuneiForm -version was released and the opening of its source was announced. April 2, 2008 the source codes of the Cuneiform OCR are published under the, and in the fall - the system’s interface source texts. The latest version of OpenSource version for Windows has not been updated since. This version is no longer available for download. Instead, the version of is available on the download page. In 2009 graphical interfaces for the open version of Cuneiform based on library - Cuneiform-Qt, are released.
Cuneiform Ocr
Starting with version 0.9.0 open version for Linux can be used as. References.