[bhanhfo]

> As far as I know, it powers all OCR at Google (e.g. in Keep, Docs, etc.).

Afaik Google no longer uses Tesseract for any of its products. Googles Clould OCR is much better than Tesseract.

I think Google devs still work on Tesseract, but only as their side project (not sure about this, obviously)

[raisedbyninjas]

IME Google's OCR is much more accurate than Tesseract. I doubt they still use it.

[crazygringo]

Oh very interesting. I'd verified the output was identical a couple of years ago, and that Keep and Docs in production were using the 4.0 beta release at the time. But if Cloud OCR is better, makes sense they would have switched since then.

Tesseract 4.0 has a brand-new neural engine that totally supersedes the earlier engine, however -- I wonder if there's any relation between that and Cloud OCR?

[ComputerGuru]

“Cloud OCR” is an interface. Something is still doing the OCR behind the scenes (and that may indeed not be Tesseract).

[visarga]

It's probably a detection neural net (such as Faster R-CNN) for putting bounding boxes around words, which is complicated by the fact that it can predict polygons in any orientation, followed by a LSTM-CRF layer for text transcription. It's a good generalist OCR but often has sub-par results for specific types of input. It tens to often miss single letters surrounded by whitespace.