Softi Software
Free OCR software
FreeOCR.net V2.4 Free OCR Software
Last Updated April 2008, using the Tesseract engine v2.03
New since V2.3
Using the just released Tesseract engine V2.03, no other changes
About Free OCR
Softi Free OCR is a complete scan and OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free ocr engine also known as a Tesseract GUI. It includes a Windows installer and It is very simple to use and supports multi-page tiff's, fax documents as well as most image types including compressed Tiff's which the Tesseract engine on its own cannot read .It now has Twain scanning.
The Tesseract free OCR engine is an open source product released by Google. It was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories between 1985 and 1995. In 1995 it was one of the top 3 performers at the OCR accuracy contest organized by University of Nevada in Las Vegas. The Tesseract engine source code is now maintained by Google and the project can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
Free OCR is freeware and you can do what you like with it including commercial use. The included Tesseract free OCR engine is distributed under the Apache V2.0 license.
Screen shot
Download
Operating System |
Recommended Minimum Specification |
Windows 2000 |
Pentium Processor - 200MHz |
FreeOCR requires the .Net Framework V2.0 from Microsoft. If you do not have this installed then the FreeOCR installer will automatically detect & download this for you or you can download it here: .Net Framework 2.0
Latest V2.4, ~ 4 Mb Click Here to Download FreeOCR.net This includes the English language Pack. |
 |
Click here for details on installing additional languages into FreeOCR
Instructions
After downloading Free OCR double click to install. The software is very simple to use.
Start by clicking the open button and try some of the included sample scans, these samples are part of the ISRI OCR Performance Toolkit which can be found here: http://www.isri.unlv.edu/ISRI/OCRtk
Please note that the Tesseract OCR engine requires images at a resolution of 200 dpi or greater and as such it is not suited for reading PC screen shots which are only about 72dpi although we have made some enhancements in V2.3 which will produce better accurarcy from low quality image sources.
Manual zoning, this allows you to select an area to process. This helps to increase the accuracy by eliminating borders, pictures ect. Also this makes the software useable to OCR documents which contain columns.
To select an area just draw a box on the image with the mouse using the left button.
 |
Here we are selecting a paragraph from a book scan. This saves the OCR engine from trying to read the dirty border and producing extra spurious characters on the end of each line which would be time consuming to clean up. |
Looking for more free OCR software ?
Have a look at Freeocr.net for a list of all free OCR programs available to download. Click Here