Updates on OCR and the OCR API...
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:
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:
Our free online OCR service launched today. What are the key advantages of this new online OCR service?
1. Fast (and no CAPTCHAs)
2. Better text recognition rate than any other free OCR online service.
Abbyy was the winner of our past Best Online OCR Review and Best OCR Software for Chinese review - but the text recognition of this new service matches or even beats Abbyy OCR. And (a9t9) OCR service clearly beats Google Docs’ built in OCR service. Of course, our little web service does not intend to match the full range these commercial offerings - but if all you need is to convert images to text, then try us out.
Don’t believe this? Then see the test data below.
(Photo by NW / CC BY 2.0)
This last post in our Upwork vs Elance vs Freelancer.com series focuses on outsourcing mobile development projects. This experiment aims to answer two questions:
(1) On which outsourcing portal do you find the best mobile developers?
(2) And also: What is the recommended technical approach for cross-platform mobile development? Xamarin, Phonegap or creating a native application for each platform?
The Xamarin vs Phonegap vs Native question has already been answered in many good developer blog posts (for example here), but just like the cited post, all of them focus on the technical merits of each approach. That is a valid. But assume your project, as many projects, can be implemented with all frameworks/approaches (like ours). Then it is time to look at the project from a different angle: For which technology do you find the most developers? [Hint: The answer will surprise you] The common wisdom is that there are more native iOS/Android developers than experienced Xamarin developers, and so it’s easier to hire people for native. But this turned out to be wrong.
Update May 1, 2015: (a9t9) launched its very own free and open-source Online OCR service - try it out and let us know how it compares.
Think English language OCR is hard? Then try Chinese. This is what I did for this review. When I reviewed Online OCR services for English, there were 5 OCR surprises. Now I am back, looking at OCR software for Chinese characters.
Why is Chinese OCR more difficult than, say, English or German document OCR?
Optical character recognition by itself is still hard. It is not a solved problem, at least not for the software available to end-users. The result of our English OCR benchmark have been mixed. But Chinese language OCR takes the challenge to another level. Here is why: