Tesseract.js: Pure JavaScript OCR for 100 Languages
In case it's not clear, Tesseract is developed by Google since 2006, having been started at HP in 1985 and open-sourced by HP in 2005. [1]<p>As far as I know, it powers all OCR at Google (e.g. in Keep, Docs, etc.).<p>This (Tesseract.js) is a WASM port of the project by a separate group of people.<p>I investigated using this port a couple years ago, but as you can see from the demo, it's fairly slow to initialize and run, so I never found a practical use for OCR client-side rather than server-side, but I still think it's tremendously cool.<p>In case anyone's interested (shameless plug), because I do a lot of academic research that involves tons of copying from webpages, PDF's and screenshots and pasting into notes documents, I created a tool at <a href="https://pastemagic.com" rel="nofollow">https://pastemagic.com</a> that helps selectively remove rich text formatting, remove line breaks and does OCR on screenshots and camera photos. Setting up Tesseract on my server and creating a simple HTTP endpoint for it took less than an hour, and for free I had OCR as powerful as Google's. Pretty cool I thought.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract</a>