By Joaquim Rocha. Currently there are still a lot of documents still stored in paper format and this presents some problems related to preservation, flexibility and even ecology. With the current Free Software OCR engines it is possible to get a good accuracy rate when converting printed text to digital format but these engines only perform that basic conversion and know nothing about a document's structure and elements. OCRFeeder presents itself as an easy to use solution implemented for GNOME that performs automatic content detection in pages, allows manual correction and uses the system-wide OCR engines to convert the text. It allows to export the documents in various formats such as ODT, HTML or PDF. This project stands as the most complete Free Software solution for converting printed documents to digital formats and competes with the proprietary alternatives.

1. OCRFeeder
static void
_f_do_barnacle_install_properties(GObjectClass
*gobject_class)
{
GParamSpec *pspec;
/* Party code attribute */
pspec = g_param_spec_uint64
(F_DO_BARNACLE_CODE,
"Barnacle code.",
"Barnacle code",
0,
G_MAXUINT64,
G_MAXUINT64 /*
default value */,
G_PARAM_READABLE
| G_PARAM_WRITABLE |
G_PARAM_PRIVATE);
OCR Made Easy on GNOME
g_object_class_install_property (gobject_class,
F_DO_BARNACLE_PROP_CODE,
Joaquim Rocha
jrocha@igalia.com
July 27 2012

2. What is it?
Document Analysis and Optical
Character Recognition
for GNOME
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

3. Why?
Paper has a number of problems
No applications for GNU/Linux to do
a fair job
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

4. Paper problems:
Security
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012
CC Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/badwsky/

5. Paper problems:
Preservation
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012
CC Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/98469445@N00/

6. Paper problems:
Data processing
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012
CC Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugovk/

7. Paper problems:
Ecology
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012
CC Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pranavsingh/

8. Paper problems:
Accessibility
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012
CC Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/illustrator/

9. No fair conversion apps for
GNU/Linux
apart from OCR engines, but...
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

10. OCR != Document Conversion
(it only deals with chars)
(does not consider the layout)
(does not distinguish contents)
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

11. What's needed is
Document Analysis and
Recognition
(conversion of documents to an
electronic format)
(first projects in the 80s)
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

12. Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

13. Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

14. How it works
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

15. So many layouts...
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012
CC Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uber-tuber/

16. Layouts vary with the type of
document
What works on detecting one, won't
work on others
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

17. OCRFeeder focuses on contents,
not on layouts!
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

18. Key concept:
If a document image can be
divided in windows of 1 (content)
or 0 (not content),
then it is possible to group all the
1s and outline the contents
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

19. Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

20. Recognition:
System-wide OCR engines are used
Engines are configured from the
GUI or XML files
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

21. Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

22. Most known free OCR engines are
detected and configured
automatically:
* Tesseract
* GOCR
* OCRAD
* Cuneiform
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

23. Exportation formats:
ODT
HTML
Plain text
PDF
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

24. User interaction:
Users can edit everything
and review the algorithm's results
So, UI can work in attended and
unattended ways
CLI only works in an unattended
mode
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

25. Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

26. Demo time!
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

27. Other features:
* PDF importation
* Unpaper preprocessor
* Font style edition
* Image deskewing
* OCR results cleaning
* Project saving/loading
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

28. Future:
* More exportation formats: HOCR,
etc.
* Make OCR engines' management
easier
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

29. Webpage:
http://live.gnome.org/OCRFeeder
git:
http://git.gnome.org/ocrfeeder
Bugzilla:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org
product: OCRFeeder
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012

30. Thank you!
Joaquim Rocha (Igalia) · OCRFeeder · GUADEC 2012