I'm looking for the best piece, or combination or pieces of software where I take a scanned image of a table, apply some OCR and are able to convert it to a .csv format or similar.
I've been playing around with Tesseract, but it doesn't seem to preserve the whitespace for constructing tables. The only way I could think to do it, is by perhaps using Hough transforms to detect the lines of the tables, then segmenting the image into pieces and doing OCR on the patches of the table before reconstructing.
The above seems very involved and of course some tables don't have an outline. I've seen software out there like ABBYY/FineReader that do a fantastic job. I wondered if anyone knows of a fairly good open source equivalent?
