alt Hacker NewsIf you're getting inaccurate results from OCR what's the purpose of even doing it? Inaccuracy of text of any kind seems like a completely obvious failure of the entire purpose of scanning text into a computer.
Replies
piterrro • yesterday at 7:30 PM
Accuracy can have different dimensions, depends on what you can tolerate and whether you can detect it to apply more powerful methods.
Imagine you have a cheap and 99% accurate ocr. The other 1% you can detect and apply more powerful (more accurate but slower and more expensive) ocr method. What would you use? At scale these things add up.
It depends on what you need. For example a while ago I scanned and OCR'ed a bunch of receipts to get a timeline of my salary. I only cared about the gross and net figures, and nothing else mattered. Tesseract's output had a bunch of errors and misdetections, but the main figures always came out OK, and a local LLM was able to pick them out from the noise every time.
There's a big gulf between "it's as if a human being had transcribed it and reconstructed the original document" and "so completely broken it can't be used for anything".