Need good OCR for printed source code listing, any ideas?

Question

At my work, I sometimes have to take some printed source code and manually type the source code into a text editor. Do not ask why.

Obviously typing it up takes a long time and always extra time to debug typing errors (oops missed a "$" sign there).

I decided to try some OCR solutions like:

• Microsoft Document Imaging - has built in OCR
  • Result: Missed all the leading whitespace, missed all the underscores, interpreted many of the punctuation characters incorrectly.
  • Conclusion: Slower than manually typing in code.
• Various online web OCR apps
  • Result: Similar or worse than Microsoft Document Imaging
  • Conclusion: Slower than manually typing in code.

I feel like source code would be very easy to OCR given the font is sans serif and monospace.

Have any of you found a good OCR solution that works well on source code?

Maybe I just need a better OCR solution (not necessarily source code specific)?

Answer 1

Printed text vs handwritten is usually easier for OCR, however it all depends on your source image, I generally find that capturing in PNG format, with reduced colors (grayscale is best) with some manual cleanup (remove any image noise due to scanning etc) works best.

Most OCR are similar in performance and accuracy. OCRs with the ability to train/correct would be best.

Answer 2

En general i found FineReader with very good results. Normally all products has a trial available. Try as much you can.

Now, program source code can be tricky:

• leading whitespace: maybe a post code pretty printer process can help
• underscores and punctuation: maybe a good product can be trained for that

Answer 3

With OCR, there are currently three options:

• Abbee FineReader and OminPage. Both are commercial products which are about on par when it comes to features and OCR result. I can't say much about OmniPage but FineReader does come with support for reading source code (for example, it has a Java language library).
• The best OSS OCR engine is tesseract. It's much harder to use, you'll probably need to train it for your language.

I rarely do OCR but I've found that spending the $150 on the commercial software weights out the wasted time by far.

Answer 4

OCRopus is also a good open source option. But like Tesseract, there's a rather steep learning curve to use and integrate it effectively.

Answer 5

Try emailing the scanned image to [email protected] and you will get the OCR results back by email. It uses a high-quality OCR engine (ABBYY) on the back-end. If you like the results, check out the API as well: http://www.webservius.com/corp/docs/wisetrend.pdf