This comparison of optical character recognition software includes:
- OCR engines, that do the actual character identification
- Layout analysis software, that divide scanned documents into zones suitable for OCR
- Graphical interfaces to one or more OCR engines
- Software development kits that are used to add OCR capabilities to other software (e.g. forms processing applications, document imaging management systems, e-discovery systems, records management solutions)
Name | Founded year | Latest stable version | Latest release year | License | Online | Windows | Mac OS X | Linux | BSD | Android | iOS | Programming language | SDK? | Languages | Fonts | Output Formats | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ABBYY FineReader | 1989 | 16 | 2022 | Proprietary | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | C/C++ | Yes | 192 | All fonts | DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPTX, RTF, PDF, HTML, CSV, TXT, ODT, DjVu, EPUB, FB2 | ABBYY also supplies SDKs for embedded and mobile devices. Professional, Corporate and Site License Editions for Windows, Express Edition for Mac. |
AIDA | 2016 | 13.0 | 2024 | Proprietary | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | All languages using Latin alphabet | Machine and handprinted text, Latin alphabet | DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, TXT, CSV, PDF, JSON, XML | AIDA is able to learn how to extract any value from any document, with a single click on a single document. | |
AnyDoc Software | 1989 | ? | ? | Proprietary | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | VBScript | ? | ? | ? | Works with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents. | |
Asprise OCR SDK | 1998 | 15 | 2015 | Proprietary | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | Java, C#,VB.NET, C/C++/Delphi | Yes | 20+ | ? | Plain text, searchable PDF, XML | Java, C#, VB.NET, C/C++/Delphi SDKs for OCR and Barcode recognition on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Unix. |
CuneiForm | 1996 | 1.1 | 2011 | BSD variant | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | C/C++ | Yes | 28 | Any printed font | HTML, hOCR, native, RTF, TeX, TXT | Enterprise-class system, can save text formatting and recognizes complicated tables of any structure |
E-aksharayan | 2010 | Yes | No | Yes | No | ? | ? | 14 | RTF, TXT, BRL | ||||||||
GOCR | 2000 | 0.52 | 2018 | GPL | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | C | ? | 20+ | ? | ||
Google Drive OCR or Google Cloud Vision | 2015 | Proprietary | Yes | Browser | Browser | Browser | Unknown | ? | ? | Unknown | Yes | 200+ | All fonts | text | Google blog post | ||
Microsoft Office Document Imaging | ? | Office 2007 | 2007 | Proprietary | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | Uses OmniPage | |
Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 | 2011 | ? | 2007 | Proprietary | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ||
OCRFeeder | 2009-03 | 0.8.5 | 2022 | GPL | No | No | No | Yes | No | ? | ? | Python | ? | ? | ? | Features a full user interface and has a command-line tool for automatic operations. Has its own segmentation algorithm but uses system-wide OCR engines like Tesseract or Ocrad | |
Ocrad | ? | 0.29 | 2024 | GPL | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | C++ | Yes | Latin alphabet | ? | Command line | |
OCRopus | 2007 | 1.3.3 | 2017 | Apache | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | Python | ? | All languages using Latin script (other languages can be trained) | Normal Latin script and Fraktur (other scripts can be trained) | TXT, hOCR, PDF | Pluggable framework under active development, used for Google Books |
OmniPage | 1970s | 19.2 | 2015 | Proprietary | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | ? | ? | C/C++, C# | Yes | 125 | Machine and handprinted fonts | DOC/DOCX XLS/XLSX PPTX RTF PDF PDF/A Searchable PDF HTML Text XML ePUB MP3 | Product of Nuance Communications |
Puma.NET | ? | ? | 2009 | BSD | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | C# | Yes | 28 | Any printed font | .NET OCR SDK based on Cognitive Technologies' CuneiForm recognition engine. Wraps Puma COM server and provides simplified API for .NET applications | |
ReadSoft | ? | ? | ? | Proprietary | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | Scan, capture and classify business documents such as invoices, forms and purchase orders integrated with business processes. | |
Scantron | ? | ? | ? | Proprietary | No | Yes | No | No | No | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | For working with localized interfaces, corresponding language support is required. | |
SmartScore | 1991 | 10.5.8 | 2015 | Proprietary | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | For musical scores | |
Tesseract | 1985 | 5.4.1 | 2024 | Apache | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | C++, C | Yes | 100+ | Any printed font | Text, ALTO, hOCR, PDF, others with different user interfaces or the API | Created by Hewlett-Packard; under further development by Google |
Name | Founded year | Latest stable version | Release year | License | Online | Windows | Mac OS X | Linux | BSD | Android | iOS | Programming language | SDK? | Languages | Fonts | Output Formats | Notes |
Evaluation
A 2016 analysis of the accuracy and reliability of the OCR packages Google Docs OCR, Tesseract, ABBYY FineReader, and Transym, employing a dataset including 1227 images from 15 different categories concluded Google Docs OCR and ABBYY to be performing better than others.
References
- "ABBYY FineReader 14: Technical Specifications". Finereader.abbyy.com. Retrieved 2017-02-23.
- "ABBYY FineReader 11: Technical Specifications". Finereader.abbyy.com. Retrieved 2013-09-12.
- "Top OCR Software". Ocrworld.com. 2010-03-30. Archived from the original on 2017-02-23. Retrieved 2013-09-12.
- "AIDA". TCLAB. 2024-12-03. Retrieved 2024-12-03.
- "Asprise OCR SDK Features". asprise.com. Retrieved 2014-06-21.
- "Asprise Java OCR Library Features". asprise.com. Retrieved 2014-06-21.
- "Asprise Java, C#/VB.NET OCR API". asprise.com. 2015-11-19. Retrieved 2015-11-19.
- Debian manual page for Cuneiform for Linux version 1.1.0
- "GOCR Homepage". wasd.urz.uni-magdeburg.de. Retrieved 2018-10-17.
- "GOCR". Jocr.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2013-09-12.
- "Supported languages". Feb 11, 2022.
- Ashok Popat (Sep 4, 2015). "IEEE SPS: Optical Character Recognition for Most of the World's Languages". YouTube. Archived from the original on 2021-12-20.
- Diaz, Antonio (2024-01-20). "GNU Ocrad 0.29 released" (Mailing list). info-gnu.
- OCRopus includes the ocropus-hocr tool which produces hOCR from the recognition results.
- In combination with the hocr-tools
- "OmniPage CSDK - OCR Document Capture Toolkit | Document Imaging & OCR". Nuance. Archived from the original on 2010-08-24. Retrieved 2013-09-12.
- "OmniPage Standard Document Conversion". Nuance. Archived from the original on 2014-03-13. Retrieved 2014-02-25.
- Based on count of language training files for version 3.04. Available at the download page.
- Usage explained in the Tesseract Readme and FAQ
- Such as ODF with OCRFeeder
- "GitHub - tesseract-ocr/tesseract: Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine (main repository)". GitHub. Retrieved 2018-11-05.
- Assefi, Mehdi (2016-12-01). "OCR as a Service: An Experimental Evaluation of Google Docs OCR, Tesseract, ABBYY FineReader, and Transym". ResearchGate. Retrieved 2019-01-31.
Optical character recognition software | |
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Free software | |
Proprietary software | |
See also |