Several issues on extending the development of BanglaOCR

As a developer of BanglaOCR, it is my pleasure to see the interest of an OCR for recognizing Bangla script. At the same time, I am quite upset when I notice that there is no progress on open source Bangla OCR research and development in the last four years since I left the development of BanglaOCR. The OCR was released open source with the aim to exploit existing work to produce better OCR. Unfortunately it did not happen, although I have already guided many individuals in their personal and academic research/thesis work. However, I am always hopeful that it will see the light of improvement soon.

I am not completely aware about the progress of OCR development in the last 4 years. Please do not hesitate to correct me if I am wrong in my statements. However, considering BanglaOCR as the state of the art development, I would like provide several information about OCR development and possible extensions of existing work.

1. Before starting the plan for developing an OCR for Bangla script, one should always aware about the state of the art on OCR development. If there is any existing work/software which is not too old then they should think about possible extension and improvement of that work. Starting from scratch is not a very good idea for this work unless you have a long term goal.

2. BanglaOCR was a product of research and development of almost 3 years. I have seen many other research work on OCR for Bangla script (including our previously developed Bangla OCR). However, most of them were not complete and limited only in the academic domain. BanglaOCR provides a complete framework which includes several appropriate algorithms for performing document image analysis task. There are several benefits of using the source code of any open source product like Bangla OCR.

- Modify/remove any particular function/algorithm from the code and include your own algorithm. For example: Modify the segmentation algorithm of BanglaOCR, and use a better one. Surely, it will improve the performance.

- Change/Replace the training data. Why not replacing tesseract-2 training data with tesseract-3 and see the improved performance!!!

BanglaOCR 0.7 is listed on Software Informer

Thanks to Software Informer (Software.informer.com) for listing Bangla OCR into their web site. Now BanglaOCR is available in the following link:

http://banglaocr.software.informer.com/

Text to Image Converter V 0.2 (for Windows)

Based on the user feedback we add one option to the Text to Image Generator and released it as version 0.2. There are no major changes compare to the earlier version (Text to Image Generator version 0.1). See the earlier version post to know about the Prerequisites, User's manual and Feedback.

Major Changes:
Just added the facility to load the text from a text file. To do this user has to click on the Open menu item and select the text file from the dialogue box.

Acknowledgement:
Sriranga(76yrsold)
withblessings@gmail.com

Download Link:
Text to Image Converter (Setup file)
Text to Image Converter (VS .NET source file)

BanglaOCR V 0.6 (for Linux users) | Released

This is the announcement about the release of BanglaOCR V 0.6 (for Linux users). The release information is provided below:

Perquisites:
1. Tesseract OCR
2. Tidy
3. Java Runtime Environment (v 1.6)
4. Font : SolaimanLipi

Feedback:
Any feedback about the application is highly appreciable. At present you can post feedback on the following email address: bangla.ocr@gmail.com

Test Images:
A set of test images are also provied with this package. So, please feel free to download and test. The images were randomly selected to test the application and obviously not based on the best performance.

Download Link:
BanglaOCR V 0.6 (Linux Users)

BanglaOCR V 0.7 | Source Code Released

This is the announcement about the release of the source code of BanglaOCR (Windows) V 0.7.

Feedback:
Please send feedback on the following email address: bangla.ocr@gmail.com

Test Images:
A set of test images are also available in the same site where the OCR setup package is available. So, please feel free to download them and test.

Download Link:
BanglaOCR V 0.7 (source code)
Test Images set 1
Test Images set 2

BanglaOCR V 0.7 | Released

This is the announcement about the release of BanglaOCR V 0.7. The release information is provided below:

Perquisites:
1. Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86)
2. Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86)
3. Java Runtime Environment

User's Manual:
The manual will be available after installing BanglaOCR. Go to Start>> All Programs >> BanglaOCR>> BanglaOCR User Guide.

Feedback:
Any feedback about the application is highly appreciable. At present you can post feedback on the following email address: bangla.ocr@gmail.com
I am planning to build a document image database. So, if you would like, then send us your document images.

Test Images:
A set of test images are also available in the same site where the OCR setup package is available. So, please feel free to download them and test. The images were randomly selected to test the application and obviously not based on the best performance.

Major Changes with v 0.6
- Skew detection and correction added.
- Noise elimination added.
- Added support to recognize multiple column/block image.

Download Link:
BanglaOCR V 0.7 (Setup file)
Test Images set 1
Test Images set 2

Modified Files in OCRopus-0.3.1

[dir]ocr-bpnat:
grouping.cc
make-garbage.cc

[dir]colib[path:/user/local/include/colib]:
ocrinterfaces.h

[dir]ocroscript:
ocr.pkg

[dir]ocr-utils:
seg-skel.cc
seg-cuts.cc
seg-ccs.cc
ocr-utils.cc
ocr-utils.h

[dir]ocr-samples:
ocr-cseg-ccs.cc
ocr-cseg-projection.cc