Like any other high-utility technology, Optical Character Recognition has also undergone multitudes of changes to become even better with time. Today, intelligent Optical Character Recognition has become the gold standard and is transforming the use of OCR for streamlining and easing business operations all across the globe.
While there are many different varieties available within this single domain, Easy OCR is emerging as a wonderful easy-to-use package to apply Computer Vision to your work.
Amidst its growing popularity, we decided to give you an idea about the software with our Easy OCR guide today. Take a look!
Table of Contents
What is OCR?
‘OCR easy definition’ is probably the most widely searched question about Optical Character Recognition technology. As the name suggests, Optical Character Recognition is the identification of different characters within an image, or document scan, or even a handwritten document, followed by the conversion of its details into a digitized text.
Optical Character Recognition has brought about a revolution in the data entry operations of almost all enterprises today. From improving productivity to reducing data handling or storage costs, and maximizing the accuracy of the data produced or uploaded, OCR is a boon for the modern corporate world. OCR has also allowed us to create 100% searchable documents that help in reducing the hassles of finding relevant and crucial information whenever it is needed the most.
What is Easy OCR?
Easy Screen OCR is developed and maintained by Jaided AI, a leading name in the field of OCR software development and AI implementation. The software uses Python for its implementation, alongside the PyTorch library. When using this Python-based OCR software, access to a CUDA-capable GPU can allow PyTorch’s Deep Learning library to extract text and features at unbelievably faster speeds.
An OCR software that can easily recognize 58 languages including Hindi, German, English, etc., is certainly a game-changer in this industry. With its developers planning to add many other languages as well, Easy OCR is moving towards becoming a world-renowned software.
The installation of Easy OCR software free on your device can be completed in a few simple steps. Before you get started with the procedure, it is advised that you install only opencv-python and not the opencv-contrib-python. Even the presence of both of these within the same virtual environment can lead to interference and disruption, which eventually decreases the accuracy of the optical character recognition.
The steps for the installation of Easy OCR are as follows:
- Start with the installation of Python 3 on your device.
- Then install the PIP package management system.
- Proceed with the installation of the virtualenvwrapper and the virtualenv on your device. Edit your ZSH or Bash profile as instructed.
- Now, create a new Python 3 virtual environment and give it a name, say easy ocr. Switch it onto the active mode with the workon command.
- Lastly, install OpenCV (opencv-python) and then Easy OCR. All these steps will eventually create your virtual environment, and after this, you will be all set to get started with the optical character recognition process.
Using Easy OCR to Extract Text
Easy OCR is capable of reading different languages within the same image provided all of them are compatible with each other. A base class for Easy OCR, known as the Reader Class, stores a list of codes for different languages and other information like GPU which is set to a default TRUE setting. Within the system, this needs to run only when there is a need to load some important models. Users have an option to retrieve model weights either through manual or the automatic download method. Learning about the read text method is important, as it is the main method for Reader class.
During the actual Optical Character Recognition, firstly the bounding box coordinates of the text in the X and Y form are displayed. This is accompanied by the confidence score and the identified text corresponding to it. For the complete process, a code is written in Python language where the user needs to set the output language for the identified text.
Easy OCR also recognizes the bounding boxes in the image effectively. A major difference between Easy OCR and tesseract is that it can work with BGR images in OpenCV, while tesseract requires prior conversion to RGB before proceeding further.
Easy OCR Bottomline
Easy OCR faces tough competition from tesseract, but most experts believe that it outperforms it in many departments. The biggest advantage of Easy OCR is that with only a few lines of code, you can easily use the software and obtain highly accurate results for Optical Character Recognition. Besides, it is extended over a large number of languages, and the efforts being made to expand this database are furthermore encouraging. Lastly, anyone wishing to use Easy OCR can retrieve the entire code for this implementation from AIM’s GitHub repository.
KlearStack AI-Based OCR
KlearStack leverages recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning to bring an unprecedented revolution in Optical Character Recognition technology. Our AI-backed OCR software has layered self-learning capabilities and not only provides the basic image-to-text features but also rectifies the errors in the converted text to ensure much higher accuracy than before.
