I'm currently testing various OCR tools to improve a document digitization project, specifically focused on large volumes of scanned PDFs like books, reports, and forms. While speed is important, my main concern is accuracy and layout preservation, especially for documents with multiple columns or heavy tables.
I've explored a few options so far:
1. **Nanonets OCR**: It's not entirely open-source, but they do have a public GitHub for their basic toolkit. It's quick and easy to set up, but I've encountered some issues with reading order and formatting in documents that have unique layouts.
2. **olmOCR**: This one is lightweight and works decently for simple text extraction. It performs well on clean scans and single-column layouts but struggles with maintaining structure in complex PDFs.
3. **OCRFlux**: This is relatively new and still being developed. It claims to be layout-aware and has surprisingly performed well with multi-column and table-heavy PDFs. It can merge paragraphs and tables across pages, which I find very useful since the other two tools seem to treat each page separately. I'm currently stress-testing it with various edge cases and bulk runs.
None of these solutions are perfect; each has trade-offs in speed, fidelity, and language support. I'm interested in knowing which OCR tools you've found to be the most accurate for scanned PDFs. Do you usually perform post-processing to address formatting issues, or do you stick to tools that aim to maintain structure? Also, how do you weigh processing speed against output quality when you're managing large quantities of documents? I appreciate any insights you can share about successful workflows or tools you've used in professional or research contexts.
6 Answers
I've mainly worked with Tika and Tesseract for OCR, and I haven't really felt the need to switch to anything else. They're solid and get the job done well for what I need!
If you're looking for a quick fix, I found that using Google Lens through Chrome (right-click > Google Lens) gives surprisingly good results for OCR. But if you're diving into deep learning solutions, that's a whole different ballgame!
Honestly, you're not going to find anything that’s perfect. Most tools come with their own sets of issues and you'll probably end up feeling a bit disappointed, no matter what you choose.
I've had decent results using OCRmyPDF, but it works best with clean scans. If your documents are even slightly messy, it won’t deliver great results. Just a heads-up!
Thanks for sharing your journey with these tools! At Docsumo, we encounter this problem regularly, especially with messy layouts and tables in scanned PDFs. I'm curious—why do you prefer open source for this task? While I understand the desire for control and transparency, I wonder if investing time in tweaking open source tools outweighs using a dedicated solution that's designed for these challenges.
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