I received this huge collection of theory papers as images that were scanned / photographed. Now if only there was a way to convert all of them into text documents can could be easily sorted and printed according to my needs ! Well actually its quite easy with any OCR service. While there are a few really good image to text services they usually charge 4-5$ for 50 images. Never underestimate the power of the internet when you look for a free alternative !
Lets look a few free online OCR image to text conversion services that can be used to convert scanned text into a text document. Most of these services will allow a max size of only 2MB per file and support multiple languages.
How to convert Image to Text Documents OCR
If you have a google/gmail account after you login you should see Google Docs. Googles Docs is like free Microsoft Office on the internet. You can create and store documents online which can be accessed from any computer just like your email. With that out of the way, Google Docs has inbuilt OCR service that is usually overlooked.
While uploading image files to Google Docs check the box “Convert text from PDF or image files to Google Docs documents”. An OCR conversion will be tried on the image file and if it is successful you will a text document saved in your account. While the OCR conversion is pretty good, it does not work very well with low resolution image.
A free online OCR service does not need any registration but can only process upto 100 images per day per IP address. It features high recognition accuracy, superior multilingual support, auto detects 153 languages & font recognition. It can also rebuild the structure and restore formatting of multi-page documents.
Like the previous image to text conversion service, this one does not need any registration. The limitation here is 10 images per hour. Multiple image formats and languages are supported.
If you know any other free or paid OCR services that you would like to recommend, leave a comment and share them with us
I have recently made a comparison between Google OCR, Ocropus, and Tesseract. When i used the same input image, Google OCR provided better results than Tesseract, which in turn provided much better results than Ocropus, although Ocropus uses Tesseract as the recognition engine….how strange!
I nearly tried all free online OCR services. All of them give more or less the same quality. I also recommend i2OCR. It strikes a balance between accuracy and usability.
change image to text converter