Are there any techniques/software that can search accurately in spite of bad quality scan documents (and subsequent OCR errors)?

Question

1.00/5 (2 votes)

See more:

I am not able to search for key information as Google only supports exact match. However, due to OCR errors, the OCR text would not exactly represent the text in PDF documents. Are there any techniques/software that can search accurately in spite of bad quality scan documents (and subsequent OCR errors)?

What I have tried:

The scanned PDF documents I am handling have poor scan quality, in spite of searching on Google drive after enabling OCR.

Posted 2-Nov-21 1:41am

Stella Merchant

Updated 24-Jan-22 3:37am

Deeksha Shenoy

v3

Add a Solution

1 solution

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Dave Kreskowiak · Answer 1 · 2021-11-02T04:09:00

"Bad quality" is not exactly an exact measurement, so the question is really "are there any OCR tools that are better at text conversion with poorer quality scanned documents?"

Well, all that depends on how bad the quality of the scanned document is. There is no way for someone to tell you what's going to work with your documents with any accuracy. You simply have to try various libraries until you find something that works with your documents.

The second part of this is searching against words that are poorly spelled. Searching against content like that, there is no such thing as "accurately". There are matches that may be close matches but with a "confidence" value that the match is the word you're looking for. That comes down to the search engine you're using, or going to use. Such engines are going to use various "fuzzy match" techniques to generate results.

*