Plausible deniability: added link to spammy file hosting service

2017-05-31T10:30:50Z

added link to spammy file hosting service

← Older revision		Revision as of 03:30, 31 May 2017
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	=== Experiments ===		=== Experiments ===

			* PDF resulting from this testing session is here: [http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=93967682158344247289 pdfscanner_test_MQ.pdf]
	* We installed PDFScanner onto the newly rebuilt BookScanner Mac Mini		* We installed PDFScanner onto the newly rebuilt BookScanner Mac Mini
	* Asked it to convert the images from the [[4_March_2017:_A_session_with_Tesseract\|previous]] experiment with Tesseract		* Asked it to convert the images from the [[4_March_2017:_A_session_with_Tesseract\|previous]] experiment with Tesseract

Plausible deniability: Add review page for PDFScanner

2017-05-31T10:17:09Z

Add review page for PDFScanner

New page

=== Experiments ===

* We installed PDFScanner onto the newly rebuilt BookScanner Mac Mini
* Asked it to convert the images from the [[4_March_2017:_A_session_with_Tesseract|previous]] experiment with Tesseract
* PDFScanner yielded a .pdf file containing the fourteen pages from that session
** Positive
*** It produced indexed, searchable PDF
*** OCR accuracy was fairly good, though not 100%, recognizing most English words and correctly spelling many scientific terms
*** It recognizes tables, non-standard indents
*** Appears to safely ignore images and diagrams, preserving page layout around images
*** Tables and such were paginated to match original layout in the resulting PDF, lining up exactly with original scanned images
*** It indexes scientific terminology, and unrecognizable (non-dictionary) terms - within the limits of its OCR abilities
** Neutral
*** The resulting PDF pages contain not just text, diagrams and images, but also the original scanner images - adds to file size, but retains the book's original look
** Negative
*** Text is not accurately reproduced
*** Problems in adding spaces between letters within a single word, and losing spaces between words, losing spaces between words and punctuation
*** Pages were not automatically oriented for English LRTB
*** Pages were not automatically straightened
*** None of the pages was automatically cropped (the reviewer cropped all images beforehand)
*** PDFScanner is faster than ABBYY FineReader
* PDFScanner vs FineReader
** FineReader approaches 100% accuracy
** PDFScanner appears to reach into the 80-90% accuracy range, but since page structure and background are retained, this would only impact copying text as Unicode/ASCII to another program, and indexing by search engines
** Both PDFScanner and FineReader grok a page's structure and reproduces it in the resulting PDF.
** Both PDFScanner and FineReader includes the background image
** As with the FineReader test, image is fairly low contrast. and again may be distracting for some. Contrast could be bumped up during capture.
** PDFScanner is about US$16 and is based on FOSS libraries, including Tesseract. ABBYY's library licensing terms are unknown
** PDFScanner requires manual manipulation of image files, but provides built-in tools for rotation and cropping.
** FineReader is hands-off, for what it does. After it receives images, it works without prompt or interrupt.
** PDFScanner doesn't provide contrast or saturation filters - these would have to be added to the post-capture pipeline to help increase OCR accuracy (a low contrast scan image adversely affects Tesseract's results)

Summary-
* PDFScanner is faster than FineReader. It looks to be a very good product, not as good as FineReader, but is worthwhile considering the price and results
* The price for a single station is US$16
* Orientation/rotation and color management should be handled prior to PDFScanner
* A user should be able to run a script to capture images from cameras, have them be automatically oriented and their color processed, then output to a "ready-for-PDFScanner" folder
* IF all goes well, that folder can be drag-and-dropped onto the PDFScanner app icon, and be automatically OCRed
* User will be required to press Cmd-S at the end, to export as PDF
* This is a reasonably usable and useful product. It's a contender w/r/t ABBYY FineReader. Either would do well.

30 May 2017: Test a copy of PDFScanner - Revision history

Plausible deniability: added link to spammy file hosting service

Plausible deniability: Add review page for PDFScanner