We have developed a web-application which uses OCR technology. We use a paid API-service for that which works pretty well. Our backend/server uses a Ruby/Rails based API and our frontend/client uses VUE.js. Now the OCR tech was server side but we want to grow into the offline/PWA (progressive web app) market as well and are currently developing an offline-version of our app. Since the OCR-part of our app has to run in the client, we'd move the OCR tech also client side which means we have to use some sort of PWA compatible OCR tech, e.g. a JavaScript SDK I have probably searched the whole internet but there does not really seem to be a solution. It all came down to two major providers: tesseract / the probably biggest OCR project (open source). They offer a JS SDK (tesseract.js) -> http://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/ but this works pretty bad. We have compared results to the API that we're using and the results are terrible. Hence, we cannot use it. ABBYY which is probably the most well known OCR provider in the web and they offer OCR scanning for reasonable prices. After calling them they unfortunately also do not provide any solution for PWAs, only for native apps multiple other small projects which use everything except JS libraries unfortunately Before giving up and consider developing a native app (which will be quote cost intensive for us) I considered to ask here if any known OCR solution for PWAs is known which I did not consider yet. Thx

Reputation: 2728

progressive web app OCR SDK (JavaScript)

We have developed a web-application which uses OCR technology. We use a paid API-service for that which works pretty well. Our backend/server uses a Ruby/Rails based API and our frontend/client uses VUE.js. Now the OCR tech was server side but we want to grow into the offline/PWA (progressive web app) market as well and are currently developing an offline-version of our app. Since the OCR-part of our app has to run in the client, we'd move the OCR tech also client side which means we have to use some sort of PWA compatible OCR tech, e.g. a JavaScript SDK

I have probably searched the whole internet but there does not really seem to be a solution. It all came down to two major providers:

tesseract / the probably biggest OCR project (open source). They offer a JS SDK (tesseract.js) -> http://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/ but this works pretty bad. We have compared results to the API that we're using and the results are terrible. Hence, we cannot use it.
ABBYY which is probably the most well known OCR provider in the web and they offer OCR scanning for reasonable prices. After calling them they unfortunately also do not provide any solution for PWAs, only for native apps
multiple other small projects which use everything except JS libraries unfortunately

Before giving up and consider developing a native app (which will be quote cost intensive for us) I considered to ask here if any known OCR solution for PWAs is known which I did not consider yet. Thx

Upvotes: 11

Answers (3)

Hammock

Reputation: 141

Imense offers a compiled client side JavaScript OCR engine aimed at the ID reading market (limited character set). There is a demo that reads text from USB camera input at https://www.imense.co.uk/OCR.html The library is not free, the demo requires HTML5 support.

Upvotes: 0