OCR Resources

OCR Software used by ADBC projects

• ABBYY FineReader - high performing proprietary OCR software provided by the ABBYY software company. The Professional and Corporate Editions are designed specifically for Microsoft Windows operating systems.
  • FineReader tips

• ABBYY Recognition Server - extends the features of FineReader and places them in a server-based scalable platform.
  • Recognition Server tips

• GOCR (or JOCR) is a free optical character recognition program, initially written by Jörg Schulenburg. It can be used to convert or scan image files (portable pixmap or PCX) into text files.

• OCRopus - free document analysis and optical character recognition (OCR) system released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 with a very modular design through the use of plugins.

• Tesseract - Open source optical character recognition engine available under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Software is capable to functioning on various operating systems. Considered to be one of the more accurate OCR engines that are available under a free software license.
  • An Overview of the Tesseract OCR Engine by Ray Smith at Google Inc.
  • Tesseract tips

• Xerox OCR engine -

• List of other OCR software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_optical_character_recognition_software

Biodiversity Informatics Tools Incorporating OCR Technology

• Apiary Project - High-throughput workflow for computer-assisted human parsing of biological specimen label data

• HerbIS - (Erudite Recorded Botanical Information Synthesizer) - Software algorithms that processes and presents herbarium label data in machine-understandable format through the use of natural language processing (NLP). Created at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

• Symbiota - Specimen-based virtual flora/fauna software with a built in module for specimen digitization that incorporates OCR technology

• SALIX - Semi-automatic Label Information eXtraction system is designed to capture herbarium specimen label data with the use of optical character recognition technologies and transfer those data into a database.

Sample Images

• Bryophye Images from LBCC project (10,500 image URLs)
  • https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/images/f/fd/BryophyteOcrImageSamples.odt
• Lichen Images from LBCC project (10,500 image URLs)
  • https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/images/f/f1/LichensOcrImageSamples.odt
• NYBG plant herbarium sheets
• BRIT plant herbarium images
• Insect images?

Museum Specimen Label Examples

• See sample herbarium label and content defined from the San Diego County Natural History Museum Plant Atlas Project FAQ.
  
• Sample hebarium label from University of Colorado (COLO):  Sample herbarium label