Google Pushes Open Source OCR 212
SocialWorm writes "Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will 'advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies.' OCRopus will be available under the Apache 2.0 License. Obviously, there may be search and image search implications from OCRopus. 'The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use. In addition, we are structuring the system in such a way that it will be easy to reuse by other researchers in the field.'"
Sign of times to come? (Score:3, Interesting)
Already done - 1GB and counting! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sign of times to come? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Do this for term papers to detect plagiarists? (Score:3, Interesting)
One awesome application of this: I teach university courses that require term papers. If I could scan and upload the term papers I receive and Google could OCR them and tell me whether th
Re: (Score:3)
Bitching about lazy students is easy. Creating new exams and paper assignments is work.
Build instructions are outdated (Score:2, Informative)
svn co http://ocropus.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ ocropus
More build info; Ubuntu Feisty (Score:5, Informative)
Here's some other information you might need/want to build this software; note that I am on Ubuntu Feisty.
To build tesseract-ocr you must install autoconf.
If you are smart you will figure out a way to omit ocropus/data-test-pages from your checkout. Do you really want to use their pages to test? No! You want to use your own data.
I built with gcc 4.1.2, YMMV. Some people have reported errors trying to just compile tesseract.
to build ocropus I ended up installing jam, libaspell-dev and libtiff-dev.
The goal of the project (Score:5, Insightful)
among other things, sure, but it's got to be a high priority for google.
Re:The goal of the project (Score:4, Insightful)
Small price if it helps email spam. (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but CAPTCHAs always seemed like a bit of an inelegant hack anyway. First, they're horrible from a disabled-access standpoint, and second they're really not all that effective against a concerted enemy when there's a lot of money on the line. Spammers can just pay a few kids in some Third World country to sit there all day and solve CAPTCHAs if they want to.
Since message boards, which are the major users of CAPTCHAs, are practically by design little fiefdoms, I don't think they're nearly as hard to patrol as a common-carrier network like email. The solution to message-board spam is to either institute a moderator-delay (for small blogs and boards), or simply make enough admins with IP-ban powers so that the second someone starts spamming, they get banned and the spam gets deleted. Lameness filters working on the same principles as email spam-filters are probably helpful, too.
captcha's (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:captcha's (Score:5, Funny)
You mean as in:
Describe what the following expression does in 30 words or less:
{"ab", "c"}{"d", "ef"} = {"abd", "abef", "cd", "cef"}
Man, I'll never get into forum postings if they do that!
Re:captcha's (Score:5, Funny)
{"ab", "c"}{"d", "ef"} = {"abd", "abef", "cd", "cef"}
Answer: Makes my head hurt...
*click* Access to MySpace granted, have a nice day.
Which forum were you taking about again?
Re:Small price if it helps email spam. (Score:5, Interesting)
Captchas are by far the better solution.
The problem is that, long term, they will eventually be cracked. I'm imagining the ultimate solution will only be to allow users with email addresses from "approved" major ISPs.
Well... (Score:5, Informative)
required_hits 5
score SARE_GIF_ATTACH 5
I don't see image spam any more. I resorted to that after I was getting a hundred or so of them a day.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Brilliant. You just automatically blocked messages from companies whose PHBs insist on attaching a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Little feifdom bulletin boards don't generally have a lot of money on the line, which is why captcha works so well. The cost of paying human captcha solvers is high enough that it's fairly rare to see spam on a ca
The CAPTCHA solution (Score:4, Interesting)
To defeat *this*, you would need someone with a greater command of the english language than simple recognition of characters, or very advanced image recogniion software. I wouldn't worry about the software anytime soon if you chose images carefully.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with your idea is that we've seen multiple examples of image search tools lately (well, two) that are capable of doing that kind of analysis. That idea is better than nothing but will
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
FWIW, LiveJournal, which is essentially several million easy-to-find blogs, has remarkably little comment spam without captchas. And most of the comment spams I've received are devoid of things like websites I could click on. I don't know what their technique is, though.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mori/research/gimpy/ [cs.sfu.ca]
Re:The goal of the project (Score:4, Interesting)
among other things, sure, but it's got to be a high priority for google.
Google knows darned well that there are tons of patents around OCR, so they're not going to roll their own internally. Instead, they'll open source the project and make as much noise about enhancing the state of the art through collaboration as possible. Then, when they get sued (and they will), they can bring this case front-and-center in the debate surrounding patent reform, citing this as the textbook example of how the promotion of the sciences and useful arts (as specified by the Constitution) is hobbled by current patent law surrounding software.
I could be wrong, but they'd be stupid to think that high-profile, open source OCR software won't be challenged by those who hold the patents....
Re:The goal of the project (Score:5, Insightful)
Why Google wouldn't want this:
1) Google's own patents on search techniques, distributing advertisement, etc. Yes, I understand that you are talking about the need for certain limits to patent law - but this could as easily hurt Google as help them.
2) They are already challenging the copyright laws with GooTube, I don't see any sense in tackling both at the same time.
IANIGHQ (In Google's HQ) but I don't see the value of getting sued at this point in time. Besides, if Google is doing this under appropriate conditions there shouldn't be concern of suits - but I suppose their Chinese plagiarism case doesn't support this point.
Re:The goal of the project (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Google's own patents on search techniques, distributing advertisement, etc. Yes, I understand that you are talking about the need for certain limits to patent law - but this could as easily hurt Google as help them.
Re: (Score:2)
So much for captcha (Score:2, Redundant)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:So much for captcha (Score:4, Informative)
The beginning of the end? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
What's wrong with kitten captcha? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, your first question fooled it (probably due to the unusual phrasing), but Google can already answer [google.com] your second one.
Re:The beginning of the end? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the text is parsable, it takes nothing to google it.
I mean, those two examples you give; just slap it into google and screenscrape it. So you're going to need harder questions than that.
So the next generation of crapchas will ask "what color is the sky".
Go and take a glance at ultraHal or another relatively advance NLP AI; a large knowledgebase is not hard to construct. When it doesn't know, it guesses. If it gets it right, then the knowledgebase increases by one fact.
So then, what, you have to ask "Given that all bleeps and blue, and blank is a bleep, is blank blue?"
Not only is that also easily computationally solved, but also a lot of people aren't going to be able to answer (smartass questions about stopping spam and idiots aside)
So *then* I suppose you have to ask "In the first mathematical antimony, does Kant conclusively prove both that there can have been no beginning to time and that there must have been a beginning to time?"
and give the user a 255 character textarea to put their answer in.
So... please, text question based captchas are DOOMED TO FAIL. stop thinking that they could work. They can't.
Re: (Score:2)
While I agree with you in principle, I think youre definition of "work" with regard to captchas is flawed. Captchas don't need to be 100% undefeatable; they just need to work well enough so that the time/energy/computing power/manpower/money needed to solve them en gros makes sure doing so isn't worth it to the spammer.
Your claim that they're useless because they don't work perfectly makes as
Re: (Score:2)
But that is only true today.
If everyone did that, spammers would soon figure out the system and bypass it.
Captcha authors** are trying to avoid an arms race. sure, you can upgrade your simple crapcha every 6 months to keep up to date with spammers, or you can put a good one in place once. Much better the latter, methinks.
It's not about what spammers are doing now, it's
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like to know how you manage that. It's a good day that I have only 1 unsolicited letter. We get something like to 10 to 12 per day, and we have sacks of the stuff to bring out for recycling. On the up side, I'll never have to buy address labels again (nonprofits tend to include them as incentive to actually open the envelope). On the down side, I hardly ever send mail anymore, so I don't h
Re: (Score:2)
"alright now I want you to tell me basically, that number three, which ever number comes after it, wait, make that before it, what is that again?"
Would google or a knowledge base beat it? And you can arbitrarily increase the complexity like with pictures.
Re: (Score:2)
find a representation of a number, find the last word relating to precedence that is not prefaced by a "not" word, do the math, enter the answer.
next super-hard conundrum?
notice, if I'd said
"find a representation of a number, find the last word relating to precedence, do the math, enter the answer."
you could reply "ahh, but what if I write this:"
"tell me basically, that number three, which ever number comes after it, wait, not bef
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The beginning of the end? (Score:5, Informative)
Part of what makes OCR work is that it assumes that the text was written to communicate meaning. It has regular characters in alignment, forming common words and abbreviations in more or less grammatical sentences with close-to-proper punctuation.
A good captcha has a non-sense string of characters in various cases, all skewed and distorted, with extra geometric elements obscuring the characters. This renders unavailable somewhere around half of the clues that an OCR uses.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As computing power continues to grow that kind of assumption is less and less important. Ten years ago I worked for a speech recognition company that developed tools similar to what Google is now using for their 800-GOOG-411 search line. Back then the state of the art was to carefully guide what a caller was likely to say, and to rely on massive dictionaries to help with the recognition. Now, 10 years later, w
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That'll be great. Then the spammers can crack the weak captchas to get free e-mail addresses and can flood everyone's inbox with captchaesque text that's strong enough to fool the OCR. This seems like a brillantly thought-out plan.
the presidential papers (Score:4, Funny)
So, will it work on documents written in crayon? It would be a tragic loss for Dubya's presidential documents to get lost in the sands of time. On the scale of the library of Alexandria. No, seriously.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Finally... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.vividata.com/index.html [vividata.com]
It's not free software, but it works extremely well.
Vividata is just OK (Score:2)
it is, however, the best OCR on Linux right now. I'm looking forward to having an alternative.
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
As someone who was consistently getting high 90s% recognition on OmniPage with preservation of basic layout and images for work in 1996, linux is a non-starter and pathetically WAY, WAY behind in this area. It isn't even a GIMP vs. Photoshop ("Yeah, well GIMP is just different and 'special'!") argument. I'll look at a couple of the other suggestions here but I had basically just given up and said this is a linux blind spot.
So if Google _also_ wants to use it to torture kitten
Ocrad (Score:2)
Captchas (Score:2)
So will something like this eventually render captchas used as a security/anti-spam measure obsolete?
Not like something wasn't bound to eventually come out to counter that idea, anyway.
Very cool. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a major need for an OSS OCR package, and right now the field is pretty bare. There's GOCR [sourceforge.net], and a commercial offering called OCRShop, and at least that I've run across, that's about it. Nothing really on par with Omnipage, or other commercial packages for other platforms.
I think there are some really neat applications for OCR that have never really been investigated, because it's so expensive to build that capability into other products. A free OCR engine that really worked could lead to some very neat book-scanning applications, just for starters. I don't think that there's really any integrated packages around for helping people scan books and manuscripts. (Right now you have to photograph the pages, keep them organized, then OCR them and proofread the text against the images. Bit of a nightmare.) I'd love to see a free application for libraries that let a user batch scan (via a digital camera -- let's not get into what I think of SANE and scanners generally) a book, and then provided a nice interface for proofreading the OCRed text against the original image.
Something like that could have a huge social impact. There are a lot of libraries where I'm sure they'd love to scan some of their out-of-copyright assets and provide them to patrons in a digital form, but it's just too technically complicated. An easy-to-use program that let the proofreading be done by nontechnical users (maybe remotely, as long as we're dreaming) could vastly increase the volume of digital materials available.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually it's done all the time. (Score:2)
Th
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Essentially, what this would open up would be a process of converting the
Never saw that one specifically (Score:2)
The one you linked to seems like it would have more distortion of the
Orcopus? (Score:4, Funny)
Level: 15
Race: Fell Marine
HP: 290/290
EP: 200/200
Water elemental
Drops: Tentacle
Wonderful! (Score:4, Insightful)
One thing leads to another... (Score:2, Insightful)
captchas (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:captchas (Score:4, Informative)
Um, the whole point of CAPTCHAS is that they are human-readable (albeit often not easily so) but not machine-readable.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Captchas are far from human-readable (the good ones at least)...
Yeah, that's why they suck.
Some forums, I have to try *four* times to get past the captcha, just to post a message about how libsomething won't compile.
If they really wanted good captchas, they need to start using problems that are very easy for humans to solve, but very hard for computers to solve. For example, picking the one photo of a puppy out of a matrix of photos of full-grown dogs.
Computers are currently really bad at recognizing images in photos, but they do a decent job of recognizing text with c
Re: (Score:2)
Image identification raises it's own set of problems. If you're working with photos, what is your source of photos? You're going to need a lot, if you've only got a thousand or so images, spammers will scrape them from your site and flag them by hand (possibly outsour
Re: (Score:2)
this problem is simply solved. create images with the subjects to be recognized in the center. now use image processing utilities to cut a semirandom rectangle out of the image (producing images of varying sizes) and to apply some effects to the image which will change all values in the image significantly without
Re: (Score:2)
"but my transform function is changing the RGB values of each pixel"
yes, but with a 5x5 chunk you can account for +1/-1/0 deviations easily, and even higher transformations won't be too hard. I'm sure each image would represent a unique range of possible deviations. Even if you end up needing a 300Gb database, t
Re: (Score:2)
As I said, it's not good enough. Detecting a subset of an image such a well understood problem that a $20 optical mouse does it 30 or so times per second. Ultimately
Re: (Score:2)
I've actually seen a prototype of this approach used. It's a nifty idea. But it's horribly computationally expensive compared to basically any other proposed alternative; a major site would spend far more using this approach than spammers would pay pe
searchable pdfs (Score:5, Interesting)
(Extra points if it somehow re-generates the actual file so it looks nice instead of pixelated.)
Perhaps this library could be used to build such an application if none exists...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Language? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Language? (Score:5, Funny)
Remember kids, there are no stupid questions.
Only people who don't RTFA who ask questions.
Re: (Score:2)
Besides, the research group being based in Germany, you'd assume that German and latin based languages will be supported pretty soon...
Open Source Ballot Scanning! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The only thing you need to scan a ballot is Scan-Tron technology. It's a reflect/no-reflect tech like the optical write detect hardware in your floppy disk drive and very, very simple (as there is a sync signal at the side of the page.) Very little processing power is involved.
Comics (Score:3, Interesting)
I would love that!
Where's the Package? (Score:2)
clara - Free OCR program for Unix Systems
gocr - A command line OCR
ocrad - Optical Character Recognition program
unpaper - post-processing tool for scanned pages
Will this Google OCR really work, and can I install it with APT?
Meanwhile, why is it all Optical Character Recognition, when the accuracy we expect is really Optical Word Rec
Re: (Score:2)
Yes and no. (I've tested it, but you have to install from subversion.)
Teas Willis [luc.edu], and the sticky tours
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
All mimes were the borrowers,
And the moderate Belg
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have a result from scanning Jabberwocky (or other verse in a similar vein) with Google's OCR?
Re:Where's the Package? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just for you, I made one, because I'm that fucking cool.
Prepare to be unimpressed, because Results follow:
JABBERWOCKY Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872) `Twas bri11ig,_ andjghe 4s1it_hy toyes Digl gyre amid gimblejn thg wabe: All xiiimsy wei^e thg borogovgs, And theamome raths outigrabe. ''ggwqre thg Jalgbervvpck,_my sqn! The jaw; that bijtel the clayksathat catch! Bgyvaiie the Jubjub bird, anti shun The frumidus Bandersnatch!' I-Ie took his yorpal sword in hand: Long timg tlgewmangome foe he sought So rgSted he by the Tu_mtum tree, And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jalgbgjwoclg, with eyes of flame, Cqmgwhjfflixgg through fhe tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! Qne, two! One, two! And through and thIi`Ollgh The jrorpgal b]ade went; snicaker-snack! I-Ie left iifdead, and with its head He went galumphing back. ''And, has thou slain thejabbexfwpck? Cpmg to my a_rxps!_my ljgaxjgishboyl Ojralqjousi dwgy! Qalladhl Callayl' He chortled in his joy. S
\ A S
X A ?`^s :
, ' Was ga. ka%#* mm. -- M 1 1 Q at ) a iv 2. `Ail A it 3*,* `i 2 (V H ;. ````( * 4 ^Nq@ Eu..*s..%im X M is ? lgh ~ ``A? S [ A Fax I /),2*gE it ^`* 4 ~ *: ' X A mg x ix, ,t~;;;..: v' it ix '~ t ~ ^ ,4~ ---= =-^ A A i gv ; * XX, x> . . N S A ft 1 A-`A 3; `> ' ''YY \Jh ^***`(?i* , ~~ x `* at -;v- *<~ ' H ~~~-=.- ; `Twas bri11ig,_ and_the 4s1it_hy toyes Dig gyre arid gimblejn the wabe; All Qiixjnsy wei^e thq borogovgs, And thdmome raths outvgrabe.
dshaw@iabbenNockv.com
Return to Glorious Nonsense Return to Lewis Carroll
Results End.
Beautiful, eh? I also tried a 100 dpi grayscale scan, which came out even more like hash (one big paragraph) and a 300 dpi bitmap (1bpp) which was about the same as the 100 dpi gray scan in quality, though a bit better.
Looks like ocropus has a while to go before it can slay the Jabberwock instead of thejabbexfwpck.
Re: (Score:2)
Apache license is incompatible with GPLv3 (Score:2)
Even though v3 no longer has the anti-google Affero provisions, Google still chooses Apache instead of GPLv3 or even v2 with a rider to upgrade to v3. You gotta believe the Google lawyers were thinking about this issue before release...
Ocropus? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)