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Free simple OCR program for Windows?

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  • Windows
  • Scanners
  • Apps
Last response: in Apps General Discussion
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April 7, 2013 10:47:26 AM


Hi all

I am looking for a simple program to help a friend get the most from her scanner.

I need a program that can take a page of text and when I scan
it into the computer with the scanner, convert the text to an editable form.

This is called an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program.

A lot of scanners come with such a program, but my friend does
not have any discs that came with the scanner.

I have done some research and found that the system called Tesseract
is good, but does not come with an easy to use Windows interface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software)

I tried the program "Free OCR" but I do not like the spam programs it forces
you to install with the main program, or the fact that it keeps a copy
of the scanned document in the program folder C:\freeocr

I then tried Lime OCR from Google, but this kept on crashing.

Does anyone know of a simple and reliable freeware OCR program for Windows?

Thanks

Barney

More about : free simple ocr program windows

June 4, 2013 7:28:13 PM

Have you tried MeOCR? It's pretty good. No spam or antyhing like that and its free. It's the best one of all the free stuff out there. I use it once in a while when I need to OCR something and it works just fine. You can download it from CNET or www.meocr.com
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July 30, 2013 7:17:54 PM

Hi, barneyaplash.
I do not recommend you do deal with your project using the free OCR tools online. As far as I know, the free ones online do not have so many professional functions as the paid ones. If you are not a long-term user, you can try the free trial package of the professional OCR SDKs first. I also want to share some information of the OCR which may be helpful:
Actually, there are two basic types of core OCR algorithm, which may produce a ranked list of candidate characters.
Matrix matching involves comparing an image to a stored glyph on a pixel-by-pixel basis; it is also known as "pattern matching" or "pattern recognition". This relies on the input glyph being correctly isolated from the rest of the image, and on the stored glyph being in a similar font and at the same scale. This technique works best with typewritten text and does not work well when new fonts are encountered. This is the technique the early physical photocell-based OCR implemented, rather directly.
Feature extraction decomposes glyphs into "features" like lines, closed loops, line direction, and line intersections. These are compared with an abstract vector-like representation of a character, which might reduce to one or more glyph prototypes. General techniques of feature detection in computer vision are applicable to this type of OCR, which is commonly seen in "intelligent" handwriting recognition and indeed most modern OCR software. Nearest neighbour classifiers such as the k-nearest neighbors algorithm are used to compare image features with stored glyph features and choose the nearest match.
Software such as Cuneiform and Tesseract use a two-pass approach to character recognition. The second pass is known as "adaptive recognition" and uses the letter shapes recognized with high confidence on the first pass to better recognize the remaining letters on the second pass. This is advantageous for unusual fonts or low-quality scans where the font is distorted (e.g. blurred or faded).
You can refer to some professional OCR SDKs for help. And you'd better choose one whose way of processing is simple and fast. It can save a lot of time for you. I hope you success. Good luck.

Best regards,

Arron
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September 8, 2014 4:59:22 AM

Hi,

if you do not get the really good Tesseract OCR engine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract) working on your Windows PC (Sometimes it crashes, but usually it should work) you can use one of the excellent online interfaces which are available for free and usually perform really smoothly. My favourite one is the following one since it does not show any upload limitations: OcrGeek.com but there are also several alternatives for your choice...
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