WeOCR Project   at ocrgrid.org

Introduction

WeOCR is a platform for Web-enabled OCR (Optical Character Reader/Recognition) systems that enables people to use character recognition over networks. A WeOCR server receives document images from users, recognize texts in the images, and return recognition results to the users. WeOCR does not have its own character recognition engine. Instead, it is intended to accommodate various character recognition engines. WeOCR provides a simplified user interface so that more people can benefit from OCR easily.

Although some people would worry about the privacy of their documents, we think there are still a lot of applications of OCR in which privacy does not matter. We hope WeOCR will expand the range of OCR applications further.

Objectives

• Design the architecture of WeOCR.
• Develop a toolkit that enables OCR developers and researchers build their own Web-based OCR sites easily.
• Encourage people to develop OCRs for various languages and to open them to the public either as a Web service or as a Free Software.
• Make some useful tools and libraries for Web-based OCR systems.

Features

WeOCR-toolkit has the following features.

• Receive a document image from each client computer, pass the image to the back-end OCR engine, generate HTML data from the result data, and send the data back to the client.
• Uncompress the incoming image file if required.
• Limit the size of the input data to protect the server from huge data.
• Examine the integrity of image file headers.
• Convert the input image into a common image format (PNM).
• Limit the number of jobs to prevent the server from processing too many documents at once and to maintain acceptable server response.
• Terminate the OCR engine after a specified time has passed, if the engine continues running (in vain) due to unexpected input data or bugs in the engine.
• Support server search function using spec files in XML.

Documentation

Download

License

The license is based on the MIT-X.

You don't need to open the source codes of your OCR engine to the public.

TODO

• Deploy some WeOCR servers. (ASAP)
• Advertisement! (ASAP)
• Find people who can provide their own WeOCR services. (ASAP)
• Find open source OCRs for various languages. (midterm)
• Improve the UI. (midterm)
• Write documentations. (midterm)
• Develop a Japanese OCR and release it as a WeOCR server. (midterm)
• ... etc.

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