We could set up an instance of the Data Science Toolkit...

Last weekend, I created an OCR pipeline with OCRopus, Tesseract & Celery/RabbitMQ. I need to do a little bit of work to make it available as a web service.

OCRopus does layout analysis, splitting the image into lines/words. These split files is then sent to Tesseract for OCR and reassembled to create hOCR output. Celery is used for ad-hoc clustering, making it trivial to add more processing capacity.

Hi Tim,

Could you share that OCR pipeline with us? I've toyed with OCRopus & Tesseract, but have never used / heard of Celery/RabbitMQ before.

I'm not so interested in using this as a web service yet tbh, a local, desktop pipeline would be preferred if possible, so I can tailor it to my own use-case a bit.

Also very interested in your setup Tim.

Otherwise the "pdftotext whatever.pdf" works pretty well! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppler_(software)

There are already lots of web services that do this for free.

http://www.newocr.com/ http://www.free-ocr.com/ http://www.onlineocr.net/

just a few examples.