free OCR processing API in PHP/jQuery/JavaScript

Question

Is there any free PHP OCR API, that is well documented in PHP, jQuery or JavaScript?

I'm programming a web app for iOS and I'd like to utilize the new photo upload API in iOS 6 safari to use for OCR image processing.

Thanks a ton! :)

(Edit: Oh and a Google-Googles like API for image recognition would also suffice, it doesn't have to be OCR, though I would pefer it. :)

@BartFriederichs Yeah but I'd need to accomplish this in PHP or JavaScript or jQuery so this woudn't work... and I want to avoid the `exc` command, because I don't know how to use it. :P — , Jan 11 '13 at 18:48
@duskwuff yeah... but I thought that there were some native PHP ocr apis... — , Jan 11 '13 at 19:28
There are none that I am aware of. PHP would be an awful language to write an OCR engine with. — , Jan 11 '13 at 19:40
@duskwuff just discovered this: http://ocrsdk.com/ and http://www.ocr-it.com/ in PHP. — , Jan 11 '13 at 19:56
Those are both hosted services -- the actual OCR engine isn't written in PHP. If you're comfortable with paying per image processed, go ahead and use them. They're not cheap, though! — , Jan 11 '13 at 19:58
@duskwuff i know.. :| is there any similar alternative? a bit cheaper? — , Jan 11 '13 at 20:46
@user1935281 Google Cloud Vision. The most powerful OCR and image analysis platform available at the moment. Free for 1000/requests month. $5/1000 requests above that. — dearsina, Aug 21 '16 at 00:47

score 20 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 11 '13 at 21:05

20

Tesseract is really simple to use. Someone has even written a PHP wrapper for it so you won't have to deal with the exec() command. Have a look at this here: http://github.com/thiagoalessio/tesseract-ocr-for-php

answered Jan 11 '13 at 21:05

Stefan

1

It seems like the PHP wrapper is a really solution, but how do you install ImageMagick? It appears that it is dependent on it... – Jan 11 '13 at 21:25
do you have access to pecl? – Stefan Jan 11 '13 at 21:25
what is it? do you install pecl or what? – Jan 11 '13 at 21:27
http://php.net/manual/en/install.pecl.php it's a tool to install things like imagick – Stefan Jan 11 '13 at 21:28
I have a Godaddy Apache (Linux) server... does it have it built in? – Jan 11 '13 at 21:31
thats ok. (: Thanks for your help... I marked your answer corect. :) – Jan 11 '13 at 21:34
It don't contain PoorTest.php file. Any Idea? (Github) https://github.com/thiagoalessio/tesseract-ocr-for-php/tree/master/vendor – Hardik Thaker Apr 15 '13 at 19:23
Found it @ https://github.com/thiagoalessio/poortest – Hardik Thaker Apr 15 '13 at 19:25
I really doubt Tesseract will be installed on a shared hosting, if that's what you meant by "Godaddy Apache (Linux) server". – ZurabWeb Sep 03 '14 at 20:33
`tesseract-ocr has Moved!` was no longer available in google code.. Google code was moved !! – Sulthan Allaudeen Mar 09 '17 at 17:46

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 27 '14 at 03:47

2

You can try http://www.newocr.com/api.php
It uses REST API.

answered Oct 27 '14 at 03:47

kmhigashioka

2

[Google Cloud Vision](https://cloud.google.com/vision/) is far, far more accurate than NewOCR – Dan Dascalescu Jul 27 '16 at 10:51
3

I hope that was available way way back in 2014. – kmhigashioka Dec 08 '16 at 08:17
What's good for 2022? – AlexioVay Nov 02 '21 at 07:38

2 Answers2