What is the best Optical Character Recognition software?
I hate to say this: my experience is that there aren’t many. I imagine you’ve already seen this chart on the OCR Wikipedia page. Yes, the chart is pretty spare. That’s because the market is pretty spare. Nobody’s developed this as far as it can go yet, unfortunately. I think it’s a great field for further work, which is why it’s gotten some of my interest as a maybe-I’ll-try-that project. So far as I can tell (I’m no expert, so maybe somebody can correct me on this) the companies that are using it extensively now aren’t using any commercially-available package but rather something they’ve brewed themselves. The most direct answer to your question is this, I think: The best combination that I’ve seen of user-friendliness and accuracy is the Microsoft Office Document Imaging module that’s available in Microsoft Office. That is, it’s a GUI, you can click a few things and OCR a document and then copy it and paste
A while back in my search for the best OCR software, all signs seemed to point towards ABBY Finereader (windows). It seemed a polished product to me, and gave good results.
Minor quibble: Tesseract is open-source, and therefore wasn’t “purchased” by Google – it’s under the Apache license. It’s free for any company to use it if they like, and it doesn’t appear to me that Google is putting much development manpower on the project, if they’re putting any at all. (Apologies if I’m wrong about that.) Rather, they’ve been kind enough to offer hosting and to encourage others to work on the project rather than allow it to languish. That’s what works best for open-source software – anybody who wants to can help on it.
