On: Show HN: OCR Arena – A playground for OCR models

[est]

Offtopic, but what's the best OCR that can run offline on browsers with js/wasm with reasonable CPU/memory cost?

Working on a hobby project that interacts with user handwriting on <canvas>. Tried some CNN models for digits but had trouble with characters.

[yorwba → est]

If the text is written interactively on the canvas (as opposed to extraction from pixels) this task is known as "online handwriting recognition" ("online" because you can watch the text being formed incrementally, which makes it easier to e.g. distinguish individual strokes.)

I don't know what the state of the art is, but an old model for digitizer pens might not do so bad either.

[tensor → est]

Probably a wasm port of tesseract. E.g https://robertknight.github.io/tesseract-wasm/

Note that I haven't tried any of them, but tesseract is still likely the leading open source OCR that works with CPU.