• Comparison ABBYY CLI OCR Versions V8 - V11

Here you will find some OCR technology comparisons between different ABBYY products and Open Source OCR projects.

The table below lists differences between the ABBYY CLI OCR for Linux with the alternative to use the ABBYY Cloud OCR service via Rest-API. Both approaches allow to automate the text recognition process via “light” coding, however the implementation is different.

• ABBYY offers its OCR technologies on Linux as Command Line Tool but also as a full SDK:
  ABBYY FineReader Engine for Linux Technology Portal - abbyy.com
• Technically the CLI OCR Tool is a code sample that is also provided with the SDK.
  The version that ABBYY offers online, has
  • installation routines
  • the options were fully tested

The table below lists some major feature/technical differences between the latest Linux CLI OCR tool and the corresponding SDK FineReader Engine 11 Linux. While the CLI Tool is designed mostly for document conversion, the SDK allows much more granular control for integration and processing.

• There are/were several Open Source OCR projects in the past and the most active one is probably Tesseract.

• Optical character recognition (OCR) is not only about pure “character recognition”, but also about
  • supported image input formats and intelligent PDF processing
  • adjusted image pre-processing to get suitable characters for recognition separated form backgrounds as well as
    • good binarisation
    • straightened text lines
  • layout analysis to detect what is
    • text, a text column and the reading order
    • a table
    • an image
    • a barcode
  • support of different alphabets
    • e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic …
  • support of different print types
    • e.g. regular printed fonts, dot-matrix, typewriter,…
  • support of recognition languages
    • e.g, Character sets, dictionaries, …
  • export formats & options for
    • e.g. TXT, XML, PDF, Office Formats, HTML, ePUB
  • etc.

• ABBYY is developing and improving the core technologies for all of the above mentioned areas for over 20 years.
  • To bring OCR technology to a new level of speed and quality a lot of scientific work and quality testing has to be made.
  • Ongoing testing is extremely important, because this is the only way that the complete package is getting better.

• ABBYY products and technologies are used worldwide and millions of pages are processed every day. To be able to deliver this generic approach for a universal OCR technology a lot of scientific research in pattern recognition, linguistics and other IT know how has to be build up.

• In daily OCR production environments a very broad variety of documents (file types, document layouts, fonts, languages, etc.) have to be processed. The OCR result has to be as good as possible - almost always after only one processing run.
  In this area a commercial OCR software probably is worth the investment, because the result of the recognition on most standard documents can be used right away. This statement is not against any of the open source projects, but as a matter of fact even the pre-compiled distributive would not be able to full fill this generic approach.

• There are other scenarios, where a specially tuned Open Source OCR engine can deliver better results than the “out of the box ABBYY product”. This can happen on certain images or document types that were not part of the core production process.

Here some external URLs where multiple Open Source OCR Engines were tested.

• Read the BLOG Article on splitbrain.org comparing: abbyyocr - cuneiform - gocr - ocrad - tesseract
  • Linux OCR Software Comparison - (5.2010)

• Linux Magazin 07/2010:
  Die ABBYY-OCR-Engine für Linux im Test - Richtig gelesen?
  • OCR-Artikel PDF 4 Seiten

Back to:

• Knowledge Base Overview
• ABBYY FineReader Engine CLI for Linux
• What's new in Version 11?