It seems like with the current progress in ML models, doing OCR should be an easy task. After all, recognizing handwritten numbers was one of the prime benchmarks for image recognition (MNIST was released in 1994).
Yet, when I try to OCR any of my handwritten notes all I ever get is a jumbled mess of nonsense. Am I missing something, is my handwriting really that atrocious or is it the models?
Here’s a quick example, a random passage from a scientific article:
I tried EasyOCR, Tesseract, PPOCR and a few online tools. Only PPOCR was able to correctly identify the numbers and the words “J.” and “Chem.”. The rest is just a random mess of characters.
Edit: thank you all for shitting on my handwriting. That was not asked for, and also not helpful. That sample was intentionally “not nice” but is how I would write a note for myself. (You should see how my notes look like when I don’t need to read them again, lol)
chatGPT can transcribe it perfectly, and also works on a slightly larger sample. Deepseek works ok-ish but made some mistakes, and gemini is apparently not available in my country atm. I guess the context awareness is what makes those models better in transcription, and also why I can read it back without problems.
I’ve read that the USPS has amazing OCR for mail sorting. It is, of course, highly tuned for one particular data format.
also, banks and mobile check deposit. I’ve only ever seen it get it wrong once.
You took the time to spell your post correctly and use correct grammar.
I used to have very sloppy handwriting. I’ve come to realize that if you want other people to understand you, you do need to make an effort to be understandable.
Shortcuts in communication do not show superiority. Too many shortcuts devalue your communication, just like poor spelling and grammar would devalue your post.
I’m writing notes for myself and I can read them. When I’m writing for someone else (which rarely happens for handwritten notes) I take the time and effort to write nicer.
Also, I specifically didn’t write the example carefully because the use case for me would specifically be handwritten notes I made for myself.
So ideally there would be a way to train an AI on one’s own particular handwriting? (Not sarcasm or rudely)
Try again on plain paper, or on lined/ruled paper. That dotted graph paper hurts my eyes and I’m pretty sure I’m mostly human…
I like dotted paper, the dots are less distracting than grids, lined paper sucks for sketches/etc. and with plain paper I’m missing guides. But I agree that on this particular one, the dots are a bit too prominent.
Are you trying to scan the text from paler with the dots? That is most likely making it even harder for the OCR to pick out the text.
I’m pretty good at reading terrible cursive, and this is my best attempt using the letters as written
Dime stabilization for enrjies were also determined from thermodynamih integsalion of the MM-GBSA results.
I think the first one in italics should be energies, but wouldn’t assume OCR would know the context to fill in the missing letters. Not sure what word that starts with thermo ends in an h or maybe a k. No idea on the one that starts with inte. I might have been able to determine those words if I was familar with the context, but OCR doesn’t work that way.
Here’s what I got with Google Lens. Certainly some mistakes, but not “jumbled mess of nonsense.”
Dimes stabilization fire einiges were also delirmed. from thermodinamik integration (I), see methods), which provide a dimict, validation of the MM. GBSA results
J. Phys. Chem. B 2018, 122 7038-2048
That’s completely incomprehensible.
That IS a “jumbled mess of nonsense”!
