OCR from image

[Oliver]

My workmate has been doing a lot of data extraction from scanned images recently. I know you specified that it shouldn't be a scan, but I don't think there is much difference, is there? The software analyses the image data. The software he used was not part of a scanner suite, and just operated on the image files.

I'll ask my workmate tomorrow. He has had reasonable success with his OCR extraction. The software he used requires some training to recognise particular fonts correctly. He was doing text and numerical extraction from printed data books. Once the software was trained to know that a 'w' is not 'VV', etc, it worked reliably.

[Oliver]

motorollin wrote:
The problems is whether or not the software will allow you to select a file to OCR or just do it from a scan.

My workmate's software will operate on a file.

btw, does this have to be a freeware operation?

[Oliver]

From my workmate:
I found the best one to be:

ABBYY FineReader Professional v9.0

the second best is:

OmniPage Pro 15 Office (although there may be a more recent version than this by now)

I think the recognition algorithms are fairly comparable in accuracy but I found the ABBYY interface to be a bit more friendly.