
Show HN: Character Recognition with OpenCV - brakmic
https://github.com/brakmic/OpenCV
======
derwildemomo
The title is wrong – it actually uses Tesseract to do the OCR.

Call me negative, but I don't see the big leap here, it's just a simple demo
to recognize text in an almost perfect input picture. It uses the Emgu CV,
self description: "Emgu CV is a cross platform .Net wrapper to the OpenCV
image processing library.".

~~~
brakmic
Hi,

Actually, the input picture is anything but "perfect". For example the German
letters ö,ä,ü and 'ß' are often hard to scan.

Of course it's a demo. That's the subtitle of the project. :)

Kind regards,

~~~
derwildemomo
It's perfect from an OCR point of view: \- Perfectly upright, no visible
rotation \- Sharp, not remotely blurry \- No visible brightness/color gradient
(as is often the case with pictures taken by mobile phones.)

It contains umlauts (and i'm not sure whether the tesseract training data for
german includes those, but i'm quite certain it does), but that doesnt
disqualify the image.

I was just saying hey, it's not using openCV but tesseract, so the title is
wrong.. and i stand by that statement. I appreciate the work you do and i was
exclusively referring to the title here. have a good day ;)

~~~
brakmic
I was learning a bit about OpenCV (bought a book about OpenCV with Python) and
found EmguCV while surfing some "computer vision" pages.

And because my company uses .NET heavily, I thought it would be cool to let it
work with .NET.

And this is it...just wanted to share my experiences. :)

Maybe it can be of some use to others.

Cheers, Harris

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jozan
This looks cool. I didn't try the examples but that receipt example is what I
really need.

I keep track of how much money do I spend on what things by going through
receipts collected over a month. While the information is useful it's too much
manual work. I wish I could just scan or take a picture of my receipts and
extract text for further processing.

~~~
archimedespi
Evernote can do that if you don't mind trusting them with your reciepts (I
don't personally use this since I don't really trust Evernote _that_ much).

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z3t4
This is interesting because I have a food project on ice, that got stuck on
OCR'ing receipt's. There are proprietary scanners that are OK, but not
perfect. There are still a lot of progress to be done is in this area!

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scosman
For anyone wanting to go deeper, this book on deep neural nets teaches them
using character reco as the example.

[http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com](http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com)

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jeroen
Is there any reason to use this over
[https://www.nuget.org/packages/Tesseract/](https://www.nuget.org/packages/Tesseract/)
?

~~~
brakmic
So, I checked the code from Nuget's GitHub pages and at the first sight it
seems more complex which doesn't have to be 'bad' but its simply more
demanding than my small example.

Of course, it also seems that you can do more sophisticated things with this
Nuget.

Regards,

