The OCR Software Blog

On June 1, 2015 Baidu -the biggest search engine in China- launched a new cloud service: Free OCR API (百度OCR文字识别). The catch? The documentation is in Chinese only. Thus, even so the launch was already three months ago, I could not locate a single English language blog post about it. This is a pity, it is really useful. So here we go.

The facts:

1. To use the service, you need to sign up for a Baidu developer account (free, but in Chinese only.. you get the idea). The good news is that international (non-Chinese) mobile phone numbers work just fine for receiving the confirmation code.

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(image: cc)

Taiwan (台灣) is one of the countries everybody has heard of - at least subconsciously. There is a high chance that you are reading these lines on a device that is either directly “Made in Taiwan” or that is “Made in China” by a Taiwanese company. As just one example, almost all iPhones are made by the (in)famous Foxconn company, which is headquartered near the capital of Taiwan - Taipei (台北, pinyin: Táiběi).

And now you are really in Taiwan and  have a free day in Taipei. And your are a geek. Here are some suggestions on what to do (and equally important: What not to do).

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Silicon valley and the USA in general are well-known for their entrepreneurial spirit. But are they overdoing it currently? Investments in startups in the United States is experiencing a real boom since 2013. The graphic below is based on OECD data.

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The free Chinese Subtitle Translator app for Windows 8.1/Windows 10 was published in the Microsoft app store. The app also has its own home page here on this blog. Creating this app was made possible because of the great advances of OCR technology in recent years.

The full application source code is available as Visual Studio project under the an open-source license. Please email me if you are interested. But most of all:

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This is the Chinese language version of last month’s Best Chinese OCR software review blog post.
英文的OCR很难，是吗？那么试一试中文的吧！本文是个人针对中英文OCR软件的评介。评介完OCR在线的英文功能之后，我发现5个OCR意料外的结果。现在再回头看看OCR中文字体的软件。

中文的OCR为什么会那么困难呢？

相较于英文或是德文，为什么中文的OCR会更难呢？ 光学字符识別本身还有技术上的困难。这个尚未被解决的技术问题，也是终端用户目前无法顺畅地使用此软件的原因。英文OCR 比较指标的结论好坏参半。但是中文的OCR将比英文OCR的挑战更深一层。原因如下:

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