On 11/28/2011 10:23 PM, Alex Brollo wrote:
[...] FineReader 11 [...] produces a complete djvu file [...] Text layer hasn't full range of details, it's organized into two levels (page and line), while OCR engine on IA servers produces a very rich "tree" (page, column, region, paragraph, line and word).
Has anybody designed a web interface that shows the scanned image and the zones or regions of the Djvu text layer? It would look similar to image annotation on Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Image_annotations
For a Djvu file uploaded to Commons, could you automatically generate image annotations for the various text columns and illustrations? Does image annotation handle multi-page document formats such as PDF and Djvu?
(Shouldn't image annotations and timed text be the same thing?)
2011/11/29 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se
On 11/28/2011 10:23 PM, Alex Brollo wrote:
[...] FineReader 11 [...] produces a complete djvu file [...] Text layer hasn't full range of details, it's organized into two levels (page and line), while OCR engine on IA servers produces a very rich "tree" (page, column, region, paragraph, line and word).
Has anybody designed a web interface that shows the scanned image and the zones or regions of the Djvu text layer? It would look similar to image annotation on Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Image_annotations
For a Djvu file uploaded to Commons, could you automatically generate image annotations for the various text columns and illustrations? Does image annotation handle multi-page document formats such as PDF and Djvu?
Thanks for interesing questions. I'm exploring as deeply as I can djvu text layer, metadata, anf informations wrapped into djvu file, and my feel is that djvu support is very primitive, the first needed step perhaps being conversion from "bundled" to "indirect" format; djvu files into the web are great exactly because single pages can be shared into the web, with their complete content.
I'll take a look to Image annotations, I don't know anything about them even if I tested ImageMap extension as a proofreading tool: take a look here: http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Pagina:Vettura_a_vapore_del_signor_Dietz.djvu/...
Presently I'm building a python DjvuDsed "object", containing any information about the whole text layer and annotations and informations of a djvu file, and I'm adding, one by one, methods and attributes such a formidable object. I'll care for your ideas while going on.
Alex
Hi!
It's reply to original mail in Wikisource-l (but I'm not subscribed to it).
I tried to push similar project on Russian Wikiqoutes (see http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%...), but looks like Wikimedia Russia has things with bigger priorities.
I see next potential benefits for ABBYY: beta-testing, publicity, spell-checking improvements, tax deductions.
FineReader is definitely valuable for not widespread languages or variants (like old Russian orthography).
I don't think that remote OCR will works good in all cases. Sometimes it's necessary to make page options modifications. FineReader sometimes may not correctly find prose text boundaries. Also user intervention will be necessary if text contains several languages.
ABBYY has own online OCR service http://finereader.abbyyonline.com. I think from their point of view, it's much better to offer it instead of standalone software, because they could actually check if software used as intended or not as well as make accounting for tax deductions.
There are some open source OCR projects: * OpenOCR (http://en.openocr.org) - former FineReader competitor. Support looks poor, but it could OCR some languages (I tired moder Russian), likely major European ones too. * Tesseract (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr) - can't comment on it, but Google looks used it.
Eugene.
On 11/30/2011 09:55 PM, Eugene Zelenko wrote:
ABBYY has own online OCR service http://finereader.abbyyonline.com
This is very interesting, OCR as a cloud service. I didn't know they were doing this. They charge EUR 7 per 200 pages, or US$ 0.05 per page, which I guess can be (almost) reasonable for the Wikimedia Foundation to pay. I sometimes feel bad because I have OCRed so many tens of thousand pages with a single EUR 129 license of Finereader. Here, EUR 129 would buy us 3700 pages.
All languages of Wikisource together are proofreading slightly less than 900 pages/day, for which OCR would cost EUR 32/day or US$ 43/day. With good OCR, proofreading is more fun, and these numbers may increase. But then again, we wouldn't need the service for all pages, as some books already have OCR.
The most interesting feature of a cloud-based OCR service, is if they can accumulate improvements in font training (?) and dictionaries from a large number of users over time. With Wikisource, they can of course get direct access to the page after proofreading.
So, is the service any good? They even promise to do Fraktur (blackletter). Does it work well?
On 12/01/2011 04:08 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
On 11/30/2011 09:55 PM, Eugene Zelenko wrote:
ABBYY has own online OCR service http://finereader.abbyyonline.com
So, is the service any good? They even promise to do Fraktur (blackletter). Does it work well?
After having tried it, I'm less enthusiastic. The web user interface is only upload images, download OCR text. There is no interaction with adjusting segments / zones or training the OCR output. Only 40 languages are supported, and there is no way to indicate special dictionaries for old spelling. Blackletter is only supported for German and Latvian. The upload button is based on Flash, and didn't quite work in Firefox on Linux, but it worked in Opera.
It worked OK for a modern (not blackletter) Norwegian text from the 1930s. An advantage is that you can start as low as 50 pages for EUR 3.50. Double that and you get 200 pages. For advanced jobs, I still recommend buying the Professional edition, but some users might find the online version useful.