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From your experience, what is the most accurate open-source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) library/software to read Japanese text?
I just tried nhocr, its mistake rate is over 2% even on an extremely clean high-definition document (2% is for ultra-clean characters in big font, for scanned books it is much worse, let alone handwritten forms).
Old Japanese cellphones (in particular Sharp) used to have great Japanese OCR 10 years ago already, so I guess it is feasible in Open Source too.
You can use these suggested parameters to increase the accuracy of tesseract.
example usage from my jtesseract script:
tesseract "$@" -l jpn -c chop_enable=T -c use_new_state_cost=F -c segment_segcost_rating=F -c enable_new_segsearch=0 -c language_model_ngram_on=0 -c textord_force_make_prop_words=F -c edges_max_children_per_outline=40
I don't know any good open source software for this, but if that is not a hard requirement, I have used ABBYY FineReader 9.0 Express Edition for a couple of years now, and I am generally pleased with the quality of the OCR results. Not sure if I can say better than 98% but good enough to be easily correctable.
I use it mostly to OCR Japanese text from books or magazines. According to its recommendation, and my trial and error, very high resolution actually gives worse results than sticking to 300dpi.
The only consistant issues I came across:
1) Sometimes it will return a Chinese kanji that is similar to the actual Japanese kanji. I don't know if this can be restricted or just because the OCR supports both languages.
2) Some character might be incorrectly interpreted through an entire document. But after the first ones it is easy to Find & Replace.
3) It doesn't seem to be able to read English when mixed on a page. I just enter that when proofing. It looks to be up to v12 now. Possibly you could find an previous version for a good price.
From my experience I can recommend you two software which happen to be the best ones in the field of OCR but they are not Open Source.
Japanese OCR was first introduced by ABBYY FineReader. All versions of FineReader include support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai characters. ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software, today announced the newest release of its FineReader 9.0 optical character recognition (OCR) and document conversion application with added support for Chinese (both traditional and simplified), Japanese, Thai and Hebrew languages.
The latest version of ReadIRIS includes Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Korean character recognition in its base packages.
I use this product for Asian documents because it almost supports all Asian languages. It's a Cannon company software and again it's not open-source.
I'm sure you'll get your desired results by using any of those two software.
