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I'm looking for a JavaScript OCR API.

Something like: send a picture and an expected result type (e.g. numbers, object, text, mixed, etc) and receive the result as a string or JSON.

Does anyone know of such an API/Service which you can access easily via JavaScript?

EDIT: I forgot to say, the main use case would be just to recognize numbers (like floats and doubles) and prices (e.g. 0.02$).

I already found some "cloud-ocr APIs" like abbyy, but they are expensive ... 2 cents per request...

Brian Beckett
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Laokoon
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    I don't understand why people downvote a question. It is a fair question. Looking for an OCR web service with Javascript API. – AlexStack Nov 23 '12 at 12:36
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    [Google Cloud Vision](https://cloud.google.com/vision/) has a [REST API that's easy to use from JavaScript](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15229168/javascript-text-recognition-and-ocr-on-canvas/38615942#38615942). – Dan Dascalescu Jul 27 '16 at 14:38

2 Answers2

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I see this is an old post, but the topic is still open and there are some new players now. You could use the OCR API from HP Haven OnDemand. There are free developer accounts, you can try the API online with your own image, and they support JavaScript (amongst other languages) and provide output in JSON.

They also have a few tutorials for OCR with JavaScript that may be helpful to you.

  1. [javascript] Using OCR and Entity Extraction for LinkedIn Company Lookup
  2. [JavaScript] Extracting Contact Information from Business Cards

Hopefully this helps.

Regards,

Hughesthe1st
(I work for HP)

Dan Dascalescu
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Hughesthe1st
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1

Try Ocrad.js. Demos:

Dan Dascalescu
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Abinash Bishoyi
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  • Do you have example for that. Or can you describe it a little bit more detailed? – Laokoon Aug 04 '14 at 10:33
  • GitHub: https://github.com/antimatter15/ocrad.js Demo Page: http://antimatter15.github.io/ocrad.js/demo.html – Abinash Bishoyi Aug 10 '14 at 18:15
  • [Google Cloud Vision](https://cloud.google.com/vision/) is far more accurate than Ocrad and is [easy to use](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11357611). – Dan Dascalescu Jul 27 '16 at 10:40
  • There is a demo of client side javascript OCR primarily aimed at ID reading from webcams at https://www.imense.co.uk/DL.html – Hammock Mar 13 '19 at 11:29