Web Based Google Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Scan Images For Text Editing

Which is the best web based optical character recognition scanner and service? Google Docs can now perform OCR on digital images. Having said that, this feature is not available in Google Docs, but you can access it via this online form (beta).

How accurate is Google Docs’ OCR?

To carry out the accuracy experiment, I’ve decided to apply the ‘mosaic’ filter on the image, making the text slightly distorted yet reading. As shown in the image below, the texts are mosaic-ed by 4 cells.

I then proceed with uploading the image, after a minute the image is converted into text and automatically imported to Google Docs for editing and saving. The accuracy? Somewhat disappointing, perhaps I was expecting 99% accuracy because it is Google, they hire some of the brightest post-graduates in the world.

Here are a list of optical character recognition freeware, if you happened to have Microsoft Office, you might want to try the Document Imaging (OCR) in Microsoft Office, as of version 2007 and above, this feature is not installed by default, you’ll need to install this feature, here is a simple tutorial on install Document Imaging.