

Neural network OCR in JavaScript - megalodon
https://github.com/mateogianolio/mlp-character-recognition

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x5n1
Someone needs to take this and build a captcha service like Google did with
reCaptcha and release the results for free. That way we can actually have a
free OCR that works very well.

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murbard2
You mean this [https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-
ocr/](https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/) ?

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smt88
In typical Google fashion, most of their improvements to tesseract are now
closed-source. It's barely been updated since 2012. It's also not a works-out-
of-the-box kinda tool. You have to do a lot of training, which is pretty buggy
and often not trivial. After struggling with it for weeks (undocumented bugs
in training, mostly), I just went with a commercial solution with actual
customer support.

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zo1
What solution did you go with?

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midgetjones
This is so cool. I can't believe you don't have any tests; I'd be terrified of
breaking something in that code.

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supercoder
Isn't it just one big test of success rate ?

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dharma1
awesome. Has anyone done OCR with Caffe btw?

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jorangreef
This looks great. How does the approach compare to Tesseract? Would it be
possible to beat the accuracy of Tesseract with this? Are there any numbers on
how long it would take to process an image once trained?

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megalodon
Thanks for the suggestion to measure the image processing time, that could be
interesting. To be honest I haven't yet tried Tesseract so I can't make any
comparisons.

However, I do believe that converting the network input to character codes
(output layer size 4 bits for digits, 8 bits for letters) instead of using a
softmax layer (would need 10 bits for digits, 26 bits for letters) is a novel
approach that really improves performance.

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amelius
Hopefully not used to solve captchas.

