Which OCR toolset is good and why? A comparative study

Abstract

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a very active research area in many challenging fields like pattern recognition, natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, biomedical informatics, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). This computational technology extracts the text in an editable format (MS Word/Excel, text files, etc.) from PDF files, scanned or hand-written documents, images (photographs, advertisements, and alike), etc. for further processing and has been utilized in many real-world applications including banking, education, insurance, finance, healthcare and keyword-based search in documents, etc. Many OCR toolsets are available under various categories, including open-source, proprietary, and online services. This research paper provides a comparative study of various OCR toolsets considering a variety of parameters.