Open Source OCR Software
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OCR Software
View 190 business solutionsBrowse free open source OCR software and projects below. Use the toggles on the left to filter open source OCR software by OS, license, language, programming language, and project status.
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Tesseract OCR
Open Source OCR Engine
Tesseract is an open source OCR or optical character recognition engine and command line program. OCR is a technology that allows for the recognition of text characters within a digital image. With the latest version of Tesseract, there is a greater focus on line recognition, however it still supports the legacy Tesseract OCR engine which recognizes character patterns. Tesseract can recognize over 100 languages out-of-the-box, and can be trained to recognize other languages. It supports various output formats, including plain text, HTML, PDF and more. It also has unicode (UTF-8) support. -
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AnyTXT Searcher
A Powerful Desktop Full-Text Search Engine, Just Like Local Google.
AnyTXT Searcher is a powerful file full-text search engine, a desktop search application for fast document retrieval. Just like a local disk Google search engine, much faster than Windows Search, it is your ideal desktop file content full-text search engine. It has a powerful document parsing engine built in, which extracts the text of commonly used file formats without installing any other software, and combines the built-in high-speed indexing system to store the metadata of the text. You can quickly find any text in any file on your disk by Anytxt almost in 0.1 second. It works on Windows 11,10, 8, 7, Vista, XP, 2008, 2012, 2016,2022... AnyTXT Searcher supports the following file formats: Plain text (txt, cpp, py, html, etc.) Microsoft OneNote (one) Microsoft Word (doc, docx) Microsoft Excel (xls, xlsx) Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt, pptx) PDF WPS Office (wps, et, dps) EBook (epub, mobi, azw3, fb2 etc.) Mind Map Format (lighten, mmap, mm, xmind etc.) OFD ..... -
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Capture2Text
Quickly OCR part of the screen and save resulting text to clipboard
Capture2Text enables users to quickly OCR a portion of the screen using a keyboard shortcut. The resulting text will be saved to the clipboard by default. Supports 90+ languages including Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. Portable and does not require installation. See http://capture2text.sourceforge.net for details. -
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NAPS2 - Not Another PDF Scanner
Scan documents to PDF and other file types, as simply as possible.
Visit NAPS2's home page at www.naps2.com. NAPS2 is a document scanning application with a focus on simplicity and ease of use. Scan your documents from WIA- and TWAIN-compatible scanners, organize the pages as you like, and save them as PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and other file formats. Available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. NAPS2 is currently available in over 40 different languages. Want to see NAPS2 in your preferred language? Help translate! See the wiki for more details. -
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The main purpose of this program is to provide functionality for extract hardcoded subtitles (hardsub) from video. It provides two main features: 1) Autodetection of frames with hardcoded text (hardsub) on video with saving info about timing positions. 2) Generation of cleared from background text images, which allows with usage of OCR programs (like FineReader, Subtitle Edit, Google Drive) to generate complete subtitles with original text and timing. For working of this program on Windows will be required "Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable runtime libraries 2022": https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads Latest versions were built and tested on: Windows 10 x64, Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS, openSUSE Leap 15.4, Arch Linux (EndeavourOS Cassini Nova 03-2023) For faster support in case of bug fixes please contact me in: https://vk.com/skosnits For donate: https://sourceforge.net/projects/videosubfinder/donate
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Screen Translator
Screen capture, OCR and translation tool
This software allows you to translate any text on screen. Basically it is a combination of screen capture, OCR and translation tools. More info and the latest release on the homepage (https://github.com/OneMoreGres/ScreenTranslator) -
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OCRmyPDF
OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files
OCRmyPDF adds an optical character recognition (OCR) text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched. PDF is the best format for storing and exchanging scanned documents. Unfortunately, PDFs can be difficult to modify. OCRmyPDF makes it easy to apply image processing and OCR (recognized, searchable text) to existing PDFs. -
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tesseract-ocr alternative download
Alternative download for tesseract-ocr project
Alternative download for tesseract-ocr project -
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OpenKM Document Management - DMS
Document Management System and Content Management System
OpenKM Community Edition is a free Document Management System (DMS) that helps businesses control the production, storage, management and distribution of electronic documents, boosting effectiveness and productivity. It integrates document management, collaboration and advanced search into one easy-to-use solution, including administration tools for user roles, access control, security levels, activity logs and automation setup. With OpenKM Community Edition you can: Collect information from any digital source. Collaborate with colleagues on documents and projects. Capitalize on accumulated knowledge by locating documents and information sources. Control business processes with an embedded workflow engine. Automate tasks. For a complete feature list visit: http://goo.gl/au8cQy -
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Video-subtitle-extractor
A GUI tool for extracting hard-coded subtitle (hardsub) from videos
Video hard subtitle extraction, generate srt file. There is no need to apply for a third-party API, and text recognition can be implemented locally. A deep learning-based video subtitle extraction framework, including subtitle region detection and subtitle content extraction. A GUI tool for extracting hard-coded subtitles (hardsub) from videos and generating srt files. Use local OCR recognition, no need to set up and call any API, and do not need to access online OCR services such as Baidu and Ali to complete text recognition locally. Support GPU acceleration, after GPU acceleration, you can get higher accuracy and faster extraction speed. (CLI version) No need for users to manually set the subtitle area, the project automatically detects the subtitle area through the text detection model. Filter the text in the non-subtitle area and remove the watermark (station logo) text. -
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pdfsandwich generates "sandwich" OCR pdf files, i.e. pdf files which contain only images (but no editable text) will be processed by optical character recognition (OCR) and the text will be added to each page invisibly "behind" the images. pdfsandwich is a command line tool which is supposed to be useful to OCR scanned books or journals. It is able to recognize the page layout even for multicolumn text. Essentially, pdfsandwich is a wrapper script which calls the following binaries: convert, unpaper, tesseract, gs, and hocr2pdf (if tesseract < 3.03). It is known to run on Unix systems and has been tested on Linux and MacOS X. It supports parallel processing on multiprocessor systems. In contrast to most competing sandwich programs, it performs preprocessing of the scanned images, such as de-skewing or removal of dark edges etc. For further information please read the manual: http://www.tobias-elze.de/pdfsandwich/index.html
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Subtitle Workshop
Free subtitle editor
Subtitle Workshop is a free application for creating, editing, and converting text-based subtitle files. It supports all the subtitle formats you need and has all the features you would want. -
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Umi-OCR
OCR software, free and offline
Umi-OCR is a free and open-source optical character recognition (OCR) tool designed to provide fast, offline text extraction from images, screenshots, PDFs, and more without requiring a network connection. It includes a highly efficient offline OCR engine with built-in multilingual recognition libraries, so users can extract text across multiple languages with high accuracy directly on their machines. The software supports flexible usage patterns including screenshot capture OCR, batch processing of large sets of images or documents, PDF parsing, QR code detection, and layout-aware paragraph output. Users can interact with Umi-OCR through a graphical interface, command-line options, or HTTP interfaces, making it adaptable to both casual desktop usage and programmatic automation. Because the project is open source, developers can inspect, modify, and extend its capabilities, and plugins allow for different recognition engines or enhanced features. -
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PaddleOCR
Awesome multilingual OCR toolkits based on PaddlePaddle
PaddleOCR offers exceptional, multilingual, and practical Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools that can help users train better models and apply them into practice. Inspired by PaddlePaddle, PaddleOCR is an ultra lightweight OCR system, with multilingual recognition, digit recognition, vertical text recognition, as well as long text recognition. It features a PPOCR series of high-quality pre-trained models, which includes: ultra lightweight ppocr_mobile series models, general ppocr_server series models, and ultra lightweight compression ppocr_mobile_slim series models. PaddleOCR is easy to install and easy to use on Windows, Linux, MacOS and other systems. -
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A GUI to ease the process of producing a multipage PDF from a scan. gscan2pdf should work on almost any Linux/BSD machine.
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gImageReader
A graphical frontend to tesseract-ocr
gImageReader is a simple Gtk/Qt front-end to tesseract. Features include: - Import PDF documents and images from disk, scanning devices, clipboard and screenshots - Process multiple images and documents in one go - Manual or automatic recognition area definition - Recognize to plain text or to hOCR documents - Recognized text displayed directly next to the image - Post-process the recognized text, including spellchecking - Generate PDF documents from hOCR documents **Note**: This page is only a mirror for the downloads. Development is happening on github at https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader, release binaries are also posted there. -
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Umi-OCR
Free OCR Software: No internet required, easy to use.
Support screenshots/pasting/batch importing of images, paragraph layout/excluding watermarks, scanning/generating QR codes. No need for internet connection throughout the entire process, with built-in multi language recognition library. 支持截屏/粘贴/批量导入图片，支持段落排版/排除水印，扫描/生成二维码。全程无需联网，内置多国语言识别库。 -
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EasyOCR
Ready-to-use OCR with 80+ supported languages
Ready-to-use OCR with 80+ supported languages and all popular writing scripts including Latin, Chinese, Arabic, Devanagari, Cyrillic and etc. EasyOCR is a python module for extracting text from image. It is a general OCR that can read both natural scene text and dense text in document. We are currently supporting 80+ languages and expanding. Second-generation models: multiple times smaller size, multiple times faster inference, additional characters and comparable accuracy to the first generation models. EasyOCR will choose the latest model by default but you can also specify which model to use. Model weights for the chosen language will be automatically downloaded or you can download them manually from the model hub. The idea is to be able to plug-in any state-of-the-art model into EasyOCR. There are a lot of geniuses trying to make better detection/recognition models, but we are not trying to be geniuses here. We just want to make their works quickly accessible to the public. -
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Tesseract.js
A pure Javascript Multilingual OCR
Tesseract.js is a pure Javascript port of the popular Tesseract OCR engine. Tesseract.js' library supports more than 100 languages, automatic text orientation and script detection, a simple interface for reading paragraph, word, and character bounding boxes. Tesseract.js can run either in a browser and on a server with NodeJS. Tesseract.js is a javascript library that gets words in almost any spoken language out of images. The main Tesseract.js functions (ex. recognize, detect) take an image parameter, which should be something that is like an image. What's considered "image-like" differs depending on whether it is being run from the browser or through NodeJS. -
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MinerU
A high-quality tool for convert PDF to Markdown and JSON
MinerU is an open-source, high-quality document extraction toolkit focused on converting PDFs (and other document formats) into structured Markdown and JSON. It leverages OCR and layout analysis to preserve semantic structure and metadata, ideal for research and data science workflows. -
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openalpr
Automatic license plate recognition library
Deploy license plate and vehicle recognition with Rekor’s OpenALPR suite of solutions designed to provide invaluable vehicle intelligence which enhances business capabilities, automates tasks, and increases overall community safety! Rekor’s OpenALPR suite of solutions utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to greatly surpass legacy OCR solutions. Now, in real-time, users can receive a vehicle's plate number, make, model, color, and direction of travel. Rekor’s OpenALPR suite of solutions allows law enforcement and homeowners to protect their communities, while businesses can boost customer loyalty by receiving alerts the moment a plate of interest is detected. Rekor’s OpenALPR suite of solutions is a force multiplier. Rekor Scout™ upgrades nearly any IP, traffic, or security camera to give you an immediate edge, while Rekor CarCheck analyzes vehicle images and returns valuable data for countless business use-cases. -
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DeepSeek-OCR 2
Visual Causal Flow
DeepSeek-OCR-2 is the second-generation optical character recognition system developed to improve document understanding by introducing a “visual causal flow” mechanism, enabling the encoder to reorder visual tokens in a way that better reflects semantic structure rather than strict raster scan order. It is designed to handle complex layouts and noisy documents by giving the model causal reasoning capabilities that mimic human visual scanning behavior, enhancing OCR performance on documents with rich spatial structure. The repository provides model code and inference scripts that let researchers and developers run and benchmark the system on both images and PDFs, with support for batch evaluation and optimized pipelines leveraging vLLM and transformers. -
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GLM-OCR
Accurate × Fast × Comprehensive
GLM-OCR is an open-source multimodal optical character recognition (OCR) model built on a GLM-V encoder–decoder foundation that brings robust, accurate document understanding to complex real-world layouts and modalities. Designed to handle text recognition, table parsing, formula extraction, and general information retrieval from documents containing mixed content, GLM-OCR excels across major benchmarks while remaining highly efficient with a relatively compact parameter size (~0.9B), enabling deployment in high-concurrency services and edge environments. The model’s multimodal capabilities allow it to reason across image and text content holistically, capturing structured and unstructured information from pages that include dense tables, seals, code snippets, and varied document graphics. GLM-OCR integrates a comprehensive SDK and inference toolchain that makes it easy for developers to install, invoke, and embed into production pipelines with simple commands or APIs.
Open Source OCR Software Guide
Open source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is a type of application that can scan images and accurately recognize characters from them. This type of software allows users to easily extract text from scanned documents, such as business cards, photos or even handwritten papers. With OCR software, you can quickly convert printed documents into digital files for easy editing and sharing.
The advantages of open source OCR software are numerous. For starters, it is typically free to access, allowing anyone interested in the technology to utilize it without needing a license or expensive subscription-based services. Additionally, since the code running these applications is available to everyone, developers are able to actively collaborate on making improvements and bug fixes while keeping costs low; this makes open source offerings often faster at adapting and rolling out new features than their more traditional counterparts. Furthermore, because open source solutions are created by an active community of experts in the field, they tend to be well-maintained and up-to-date with the latest technologies; this ensures that any documents converted through such programs will remain accurate for longer periods of time.
That being said, there are some drawbacks when using open source OCR software compared to proprietary versions; namely, some may lack customer support due to not having a dedicated team working on developing their product nor providing updates internally. Also depending on the company powering an open source offering they may be slower at fixing issues than proprietary options given they lack direct access to enough resources needed for rapid reactions in case of problems occurring within their platforms.
Overall though utilizing an open source OCR solution offers many benefits: among them cost efficiency when compared with other paid solutions as well as high quality conversion results driven by a passionate global community continuously striving for excellence in image recognition technologies.
Features of Open Source OCR Software
- Text Recognition: Open source OCR software can accurately recognize text within an image or PDF, allowing for easier conversion and faster editing of documents.
- Language Detection: Open source OCR software can detect the language of a document and convert it into the user’s own language settings.
- Formatting Retention: The open source OCR software preserves existing formatting when converting a document, so that any bolded, italicized or underlined words remain intact.
- Compatibility with Multiple File Types: The open-source OCR is compatible with multiple file types such as PDF, BMP, JPEG, GIFF and TIFF files to ensure accuracy when scanning documents.
- Process Large Volumes of Content Quickly: Open source OCR is designed to process large volumes of content quickly by employing multi-threading techniques for more efficient processing.
- Integrated Image Cleanup Capabilities: Open source OCP includes image cleanup capabilities which enable users to clean up scanned images before converting them into digital text. This ensures accuracy during the conversion process.
- Tesseract/OCR Engine Support: Supported by the highly accurate Tesseract or other Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines, open source OCR provides reliable results regardless if you are dealing with printed texts or handwritten documents.
Types of Open Source OCR Software
- Tessearct OCR: Tessearct OCR is an open source optical character recognition (OCR) software that can be used to identify and extract text from images. It uses machine learning techniques to recognize the text and it is capable of recognizing multiple languages.
- GOCR: GOCR is an open source OCR software designed for scanning documents in various formats. It utilizes neural networks and pattern recognition algorithms to recognize patterns in scanned texts and can also process non-standardized fonts from different sources.
- Hive OCX Suite: Hive OCX Suite is a collection of open source tools that includes components for OCR, document layout analysis and barcode recognition. It supports all major image file formats like JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF etc., as well as popular page layout file formats such as PDF, DOC and HTML files.
- ABBYY FineReader: ABBYY FineReader is an advanced open source OCR solution providing reliable character recognition for more than 200 languages. It provides high accuracy results even with complex layouts or small font sizes on hard to read documents such as printed pictures or low contrast documents with quality image input files only.
- Accusoft PrizmDoc Viewer: Accusoft PrizmDoc Viewer is an open source software suite that provides support for viewing and manipulating a variety of different types of documents including those containing OCR data sets. This suite combines both browser plugins for viewable content alongside advanced features like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology which can detect text within the images or scanned pages making them searchable by keyword inputs within their respective platform's interface if desired by the user/administrator setting up the program in their environment.
Open Source OCR Software Advantages
- Cost: One of the primary benefits of open source OCR software is that it is usually free to use and doesn’t require a subscription fee. This makes it an attractive option for those on tight budgets who would not otherwise be able to use more expensive commercial OCR services.
- Customizability: Most open source OCR software allows users to customize the program so that it works best for their specific purpose. This can include adjusting settings such as sensitivity, accuracy levels, layout analysis, data extraction rules, and more.
- Community Support: Many open source OCR programs have active user communities that offer helpful advice and tips for getting the most out of the software. Users can also get access to code samples from other developers or ask questions about difficult issues in order to find solutions quickly.
- Accessibility: Open source programs are often easy to install and run on any operating system or device with internet access, making them accessible for users with limited resources or computer knowledge. Additionally, the code associated with many open-source programs is often visible and accessible by anyone who knows programming languages like C++ or Python which makes troubleshooting possible without needing technical assistance from a vendor or manufacturer.
- New Features: Thanks to its open-source nature, new features can be added fairly quickly by contributors who want to improve existing functionality of an application or add entirely new capabilities. This means that users benefit from frequent updates keeping their applications up-to-date and feature-rich at all times without needing expensive upgrades every year or two as they would with commercial alternatives.
What Types of Users Use Open Source OCR Software?
- Students: Students often use open source OCR software to quickly scan books and documents for research or writing projects.
- Teachers: Teachers are able to transfer text from paper documents into a digital format, allowing them to create assignment sheets, class notes, and other materials with ease.
- Small Business Owners: Small business owners can easily convert hard copies of invoices, contracts, memos, and other important paperwork into an editable digital file.
- Librarians & Archivists: Those who work in libraries and archives can save time by converting books, manuscripts, and other collections into digital formats that are easier to store and sort through.
- Researchers: Researchers benefit from using OCR software as it allows them to effectively scan texts for specific keywords or phrases without having to manually enter the data.
- Journalists & Writers: Journalists and writers find Open Source OCR software helpful when transcribing large amounts of data such as interviews or court proceedings.
How Much Does Open Source OCR Software Cost?
Open source OCR software is typically available at no cost. There are a variety of open source solutions, such as Tesseract, CuneiForm, and GOCR that can be downloaded for free. Typically, these programs require that the user install some additional libraries or components before use. These may be available for free from other sources or may have to be purchased separately.
Once installed, most of these programs offer basic text recognition capabilities but do not provide advanced features like form recognition or formatting options. For those looking for more robust solutions, there are commercial OCR applications available that come with a variety of options and support services. These usually require an upfront fee as well as ongoing subscription payments in order to access their full range of features.
What Software Can Integrate With Open Source OCR Software?
Open source OCR software can be integrated with many types of software, including document management and workflow systems, accounting and financial applications, search engines, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, data analysis tools, document imaging solutions and translation services. Essentially any system that deals with large amounts of textual data immediately benefits from being able to take advantage of the OCR technology offered by open source solutions. By using an efficient OCR technology such as one found in an open source solution, users are able to go through a much more streamlined process when it comes to dealing with scanned images or documents containing text.
Trends Related to Open Source OCR Software
- Open source OCR software has become increasingly popular in recent years as businesses, governments, and individuals seek out cost-effective and customizable solutions for their optical character recognition needs.
- Open source OCR software offers users a variety of features that can be tailored to their specific requirements, while avoiding the high costs associated with proprietary solutions.
- Many open source OCR software packages offer advanced features such as multi-language support, automated document indexing, and integration with other applications.
- Additionally, open source OCR software is often more secure than proprietary solutions due to its open source nature, which allows for the detection and remediation of security vulnerabilities more quickly.
- As more organizations move towards digital transformation initiatives, the demand for open source OCR software is expected to increase.
- This trend is also likely to continue as more companies move towards cloud-based solutions for their data storage and processing needs.
How To Get Started With Open Source OCR Software
Using open source object-relational mapping (ORM) software is a great way for users to reduce the amount of time spent writing code and increase their productivity. Getting started with ORM can be quite straightforward and easy if users are familiar with working with databases.
The first step in using ORM is to select an appropriate ORM tool. Some popular options include Hibernate, JPA, LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, and Spring Data JPA. Each of these tools has different features and capabilities so users should review each one carefully before making their selection.
Once a tool has been selected, users should then install the necessary components needed for running that particular type of ORM software. This typically includes database drivers as well as relevant frameworks such as Java or .NET framework libraries.
Next, users need to establish mappings between the database tables and corresponding object classes in their programming language of choice—often through annotations or XML configuration files depending on the platform used. Doing this will allow the ORM layer to map data from existing database tables into objects that can be more easily manipulated within your application code.
Finally, once all of these steps have been completed successfully, users should configure any remaining settings
