Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools are used for extracting text from images. There are many off-the-shelf OCR tools we can choose from. In a previous blogpost , I compared the performance of several open-source and commercial OCR tools. I’d like to go further and summarize the installation of these tools. In this blogpost, I will talk about the installation of Tesseract, Abbyy, Amazon Textract, and Google Cloud Vision. Tesseract: Tesseract is a free software package which accepts a wide range of file formats such as JEPG, PNG, TIFF, and BMP. The installation on a Win10 system is as follows: Step 1:  Download tesseract executable file  tesseract.exe  from this website .  Double click the file and it will guide you through installation. Step 2: Download the language package to the installation directory of the tesseract executable file. It must be compatible with the version of tesseract.exe . This is the ...

The task is to extract labels from US patent figures. Patent figures are different from natural images. They are usually drawings of an object or diagrams such as circuits. A figure file may contain one or multiple figures, each of which has a label. We need to find a software tool that can reliably identify figure labels. All the figures are in TIF format when they are downloaded from the USPTO patent repository. In the following experiments, I use OCR tools to extract figure labels using the whole figure file as the input. The candidates I compare include tesseract , Abbyy , Amazon Textract API , and Google cloud vision API . Below are figure samples and my comments. Figure #1 Figure #1 is a standard type of figure with one drawing and one label. Figure #2 Figure #2 represents figures with multiple drawings and labels. We need to extract both labels. The dot lines at the bottom of the outsole m...