OCRopus is an OCR system. I initially wanted to see how it can handle handwriting. So, I gave it a try by installing it on Ubuntu 8.04. To get started, I used Synaptic to install the following required software:
- jam
- libpng12-dev
- libjpeg-dev
- libtiff-dev
I installed one of the optional packages, libaspell-dev
. Beyond that, I also installed build-essentials
for the compilers needed to build from source.
Next, I checked out tesseract-ocr
from Google.
svn co http://tesseract-ocr.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ tesseract-ocr
I had to use the patch from this forum thread. To install the patch, I used this command:
patch java/makefile < java
Note that java
is the patch file and java/makefile
is the make file in tesseract-ocr/java
directory. After I applied the patch, I continued building tesseract-ocr
./configure make sudo make install
Now I have all the required software, now I am ready to install ocropus
:
svn co http://ocropus.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ cd trunk ./configure jam sudo jam install
By this step, the basic ocropus
is installed.
One thing I noticed after the initial install, I needed to create /usr/local/ocroscript
directory and create the following two soft links within the newly created directory.:
ocroscript -> ../bin/ocroscript scripts -> ../share/ocropus/script
To test the software, I used the sample image came with the software:
/usr/local/bin/ocrocmd /data/pages/alice_1.png |less
The default test case above worked for me. Next, I took out my camera and took a picture of my handwriting. Upload the image and ran it through the OCR software. I was disappointed to find that ocropus
couldn’t recognize my handwriting very well. Is there something that can do better?
The patch you mention is not available. Probably stripped off email to the list.
Do you have a way to post the patch in a way that it can be accessed by more than just the guy it was originally sent to?
Hi Bob,
Somehow the direct link doesn’t work. If you click on the forum link (the second one) and click on the entry by Jeffrey Ratcliffe, you will see the attached patch file. Hope this helps,