OCR is short for Optical Character Recognition, a well-known and widely used technology in education and other fields to convert printed documents back to text copies. If you want to store some selected pages of a magazine, you can scan them. Later, you feel the need of editing them to write your own story. For this, you can feed the scanned document to OCR reader and it will read all the text characters and formatting and give the final output in a text file. This process is generally known as “Image to Text” Conversion.
But, this technology is still under development and there is no such application that works 100% when performing OCR. Though, Google Docs can be used to extract text from images, here is five more web tools that you can try for OCR and suggest our readers the best performing tool.
Free-online-ocr.com
Free Online OCR is a free service that allows you to easily convert scanned documents, faxes, photos into editable and searchable text. Free-online-ocr.com is the site that has an easy interface to work, I have found so far. You can easily find the options for uploading and converting an image to text. It also provides the options to convert documents into 4 popular formats – .doc, .pdf, .rtf and .txt. It accepts all formats of images like GIF, BMP, JPEG, TIFF or PNG. It does also have an integrated dictionary. The conversion speed is good and you have no need to register in this site.
i2OCR.Com
i2OCR.com is a free service with no sign up, no limitation of uploaded file size or number of input files per hour. The interesting feature is that you can choose between 33 different languages before converting the uploaded file into text format. It also has More Productivity Tools tab that includes various options to design your pages to give Phonetic keyboard layout, graphical symbols, Arabic Transliteration etc..
NewOCR.Com
NewOCR.com is a free online service based on Tesseract Optical Character Recognition engine. NewOCR.com feels a bit cluttered with lots of advertisements. It analyzes the text from any image file that you upload, and then converts the text from the image so that you can easily edit it on your computer. It supports 39 languages including Greek, Chinese, Slovakian and Vietnamese. You can save recognition results as .txt, .html, .doc, .pdf, .rtf, LibreOffice and .odt extensions. There is no need to register in this site also.
Free-OCR.Com
Free-OCR.Com is a free online tool to extract text from any image from JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP or PDF extensions. This also has a pretty interface with great converting speed. Despite being free service, you can’t upload a file bigger than 2MB and no wider or higher than 5000 pixels plus. There is a limit of 10 image uploads per hour. Read more on how to pickup text from images online.
OnlineOCR.Net
OnlineOCR.Net is also an easy to use interface service that recognizes and converts text and characters from PDF scanned documents, photographs and digital camera captured images. It supports 32 languages. You can extract text from JPG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, GIF format images and convert into editable .doc, .txt, .pdf, .html formats. It also provides .xls or MS excel file format in output choice as well. There is a limit of 15 images per hour for users who don’t sign up to use their service. However, signing up with the service removes the limitation.
Let us know which service did you find more easy and useful.
Hi! This OCR product worked well for my company!
http://www.cvisiontech.com/products/general/ocr-engine.html?lang=eng
Hi. you’ve mentioned really great tools for converting images to the text online. I was just amazed because it even don’t requires an extension to install on our browser….
Please keep sharing these great stuff…
OnlineOCR.Net was the only one able to OCR an image with text in Bulgarian language, nice job!
Hello, add plz http://img2txt.com/ OCR Service.English interface will be soon. Thanks)
You may also like to check this free arabic ocr named Barea
https://arabicocr.wordpress.com
take a look at this OCR – Image to Text Online Converter
They are great. I heard of them before. Optical character recognition software or OCR Software is really great software which can convert our image into a text document. I am using Yunmai Document Recognition, a document reader developed by Yunmai Technology. It is able to extract the text from an image of a document, and then save it as text file. This software is a demo of Yunmai Document Recognition OCR SDK.
Only OnlineOCR.net worked for my not so sharp jpg images.
i2OCT did not recognize my pdf (not so sharp fonts anyway). free-online ocr was too slow (after uploading the file it took a long time) to convert my file (12 page pdf).
Online OCR was nearly perfect, it took much less time than free-onlineocr, in fact I tried it after free-onlineocr almost reached %60 and it finished at free-onlineocr’s %80.
Recommending onlineOCR
I tried to OCR a photo of a recipe taken with a mobile. The quality was not the best but still very easily read by a human eye.
The result was quite disappointing. http://www.free-ocr.com/ did the best job though and the result was partly readable/understandable.
These are probably all fine, but the one I always use is Free-OCR and it works great!
The Top 5 Free Online OCR Services to Convert Images to Text you suggested are helpful for me. I am using Yunmai Document Recognition, a document reader developed by Yunmai Technology. It is able to extract the text from an image of a document, and then save it as text file. This software is a demo of Yunmai Document Recognition OCR SDK.
Thanks for your suggestions. They are helpful for me. Simple OCR looks cool because it can recognize handwriting. When choosing OCR software, I always think about the recognition accuracy and recognition speed. As I know, Yunmai Technology is also very professional on OCR technology. Yunmai Document Recognition is really great for me. The average time for recognition of a document less than 6 seconds. The recognition accuracy can reach 99%. It can convert documents into PDF, Word, Text format files.
I think that the quality of the finished OCR product is more key than the speed of the recognition. For example, when converting scans of court transcripts, the OCR software needs to recognize that the sidebar of line numbers is not the body of text and neither is the header or footer. This information appears on every page. Most online services and commercial software does not account for this. Thus, every line is cluttered with useless information forcing the user to either accept a poor result or manually edit every line. Try doing that for 500 pages of text. The only service I found that correct this deficiency is http://www.onlineocr.net. I am not affiliated with them in anyway. However, I have spent day after day trying to resolve the same issue over and over again. To date, I have yet to find a software product that I can use. Until then, I have been using the above service. You can try it for free with registering or if you registered you can try for 25 pages. Notice that the header, footer, line numbers are placed in a “textbox”, but not in the body of text in a docx file. Another reason that this is useful is that you can now make a “highlightable” PDF file. You can then open the docx file in word and print to a PDF file using any freely available PDF writer (I use cutepdf). Open the PDF with Adobe Acrobat. You can now highlight specific text and comments collaboratively with other users. Third, when the OCR/docx file is printed, it looks just like the original and the page number DO NOT CHANGE. Very important! You can use the above method to review a transcript in trial preparation, while still using the ‘scanned’ version for your exhibit. Thus, there is no risk that you introduced a typo by converting the original file. I hope this helps lawyers and paralegals.
I used this webpage for scanning a book to searchable PDF. the result was satisfying. The support team said the website uses Omnipage on the backend. https://cloud.dynamsoft.com/ocr/online-text-recognition-pdf.aspx
Services are available to convert image to text any font any format to editable text. Providing software also.