Adapting the Tesseract open source OCR engine for multilingual OCR
Ray Winfield Smith, Daria Antonova, Dar-Shyang Lee · 2009
We describe efforts to adapt the Tesseract open source OCR engine for multiple scripts and languages. Effort has been concentrated on enabling generic multi-lingual operation such that negligible customization is required for a new language beyond providing a corpus of text. Although change was required to various modules, including physical layout analysis, and linguistic post-processing, no change was required to the character classifier beyond changing a few limits. The Tesseract classifier has adapted easily to Simplified Chinese. Test results on English, a mixture of European languages, and Russian, taken from a random sample of books, show a reasonably consistent word error rate between 3.72% and 5.78%, and Simplified Chinese has a character error rate of only 3.77%.