Ask HN: How Do You Create An OCR Web Service? - HNY 2014 HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994491

by davidsmith8900 • 13 years ago

1 4 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

HNY 2014 HN. Im trying to create an ocr web service with Tesseract OCR, but I dont know how to get started. What should I do? Do I need dedicated hosting service or virtual private service?

tgflynn2• 13 years ago

There are a number of existing OCR web services, both free and paid (try Googling "online ocr"). I think some of them use Tesseract. What advantages would your service offer compared to these ?

davidsmith89002• 13 years ago

- Thank you for the response tgflynn and happy new year. I just wanted to understand the architecture of how one is created. Like I want to understand how it works. If somebody points me to a paper or a book, I would be glad to look at it.

tgflynn2• 13 years ago

I doubt there are any books specifically on the subject of how to build an online OCR service. If you're interested in the underlying technology of OCR or the orthogonal question of the mechanics of building web applications in general you may find something.

The most basic workflow would be to implement a simple web app that allows uploading an image file, save the the file to local disk, run the Tesseract program and generate a new web page that displays the Tesseract textual output to the user.

There is going to be much more CPU utilization per query than for a typical web application so if you want to scale you'll probably need some sort of distributed load balancing architecture with multiple (possibly virtual) servers.

If you don't care about scaling and just want to test something out you'll at least need a hosting provider that allows you to compile and install software. That probably means a virtual server like EC2 or something similar.

Ask HN: How Do You Create An OCR Web Service? - HNY 2014 HN

Related Stories