JavaScript library for OCR

Question

My product manager just asked me for at OCR text recognition operation to be used with the hybrid application i've been developing. I have been looking at tesseract, Ocrad, and some other alternatives, yet they seem so inconsistent.

Is there any better alternatives for OCR?

I am using it for scraping text from business cards. I know this poses some problems when fonts, colors etc. are not identical. The inconsistency I am facing is most like due to this.

I've been testing some native Android applications like snapBizCard and alike seem to be doing this just fine when testing. But I need to use a JavaScript library.

Answer 1

If you are interested in working with a commercial product, you should check out the LEADTOOLS OCR SDK. All of the OCR would be done server side and written in just a few lines of codes:

// Initialize the OCR engine
ocrEngine = OcrEngineManager.CreateEngine(OcrEngineType.Advantage, 

// Startup the engine
ocrEngine.Startup(null, null, null, @"C:\LEADTOOLS 19\Bin\Common\OcrAdvantageRuntime");

using (IOcrDocument ocrDocument = ocrEngine.DocumentManager.CreateDocument())
{
 //Load image
 RasterImage image = ocrEngine.RasterCodecsInstance.Load(file, 0, CodecsLoadByteOrder.Rgb, 1, -1);
 //Add pages
 ocrDocument.Pages.AddPages(image, 1, -1, null);

 //Recognize Page
 ocrDocument.Pages.Recognize(null);

 //Save Output 
 ocrDocument.Save(outPut, Leadtools.Forms.DocumentWriters.DocumentFormat.Text, null);
}

You can also test our HTML5/JavaScript demo found here with the business cards you mentioned above. If you would like to test out the SDK, you can download the free 60 day trial which includes the demos as well as the source code for them.

You can view a project specifically for extracting contact info from business cards with OCR here

Disclaimer: I am an employee of this product

Answer 2

Based on your description, OCRSDK.com could be the choice for you. Apart from offering highly accurate OCR it provides specific API for Business Cards recognition, that not only recognizes the text, but also splits it out on fileds (Name, Company, Title, Phone, etc.)

It is commertial SDK, but also offers some free amount of recongitions too.

Specifically for JavaScript there is sample code that demostrates how to use it in your App: https://github.com/abbyysdk/ocrsdk.com/tree/master/JavaScript

Answer 3

Imense Ltd offer a commercial client side Javascript OCR engine. There is a free demo at https://www.imense.co.uk/OCR.html. It will read local image files and has HTML5 camera access if you have a decent webcam. The OCR engine is limited to western script and does not use a language mode so should work on business cards.