best foss app for OCR?

(⬤ᴥ⬤)@lemmy.blahaj.zone to Android@lemmy.world – 38 points –

i've been searching for a while but none of the ones i find are great, the one i landed on hasn't been updated in over a year

11

https://github.com/Akylas/OSS-DocumentScanner

I use this app for scanning documents, I just tried sharing a picture to the app and running OCR on that picture, which also worked fine, so it should also fit your usecase.

Idk if my handwriting is messy or what but the ocr comes up pretty terribly when I do it. Still probably the best pdf scanner nonetheless.

Not particularly Android related but I'm fairly certain you can do some OCR with Python. Question is whether you want to analyse an image file or straight into the camera. The latter might be a challenge.

i have posted this in an android community because i want to do it with an android app :/
unless there's a way to easily run a python program with all the necessary dependencies on android this does not help me

no need for Python. there’s a Google SDK, ML Kit, that will do the heavy lifting on this. if that’s not acceptable, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and ONNX support Android, albeit not as nicely integrated.

your image processing pipeline will be imageSource -> RGB encoding -> OCR -> profit. your OCR just needs an RGB encoded image. doesn’t matter if that’s a JPEG or YUV video feed at the source.

as for if there’s an app that fits OP’s exact use case, dunno.

Man, you over complicated this task. OP, in F-Droid there are three apps that are based on a popular OCR Python library called tesseract. Just search for this term on F-Droid and give those apps a try.

i mean, you’re right. i’m just saying it’s a little silly to ship a Python interpreter when there are easier, better supported ways to do the same thing.

looks like tesseract provides C bindings which are probably being utilized in those apps.