Open Source C++ OCR Software

Tesseract is an open source OCR or optical character recognition engine and command line program. OCR is a technology that allows for the recognition of text characters within a digital image. With the latest version of Tesseract, there is a greater focus on line recognition, however it still supports the legacy Tesseract OCR engine which recognizes character patterns. Tesseract can recognize over 100 languages out-of-the-box, and can be trained to recognize other languages. It supports various output formats, including plain text, HTML, PDF and more. It also has unicode (UTF-8) support.

Alternative download for tesseract-ocr project

PaddleOCR offers exceptional, multilingual, and practical Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools that can help users train better models and apply them into practice. Inspired by PaddlePaddle, PaddleOCR is an ultra lightweight OCR system, with multilingual recognition, digit recognition, vertical text recognition, as well as long text recognition. It features a PPOCR series of high-quality pre-trained models, which includes: ultra lightweight ppocr_mobile series models, general ppocr_server series models, and ultra lightweight compression ppocr_mobile_slim series models. PaddleOCR is easy to install and easy to use on Windows, Linux, MacOS and other systems.

PaddleOCR-json is an OCR engine based on the PaddleOCR project that provides a command-line interface and tools for extracting text from images and exporting results in structured JSON format. It wraps the PaddleOCR models, which are capable of detecting and recognizing text in a wide variety of languages and layouts, into a self-contained executable that can be run locally without needing a deep learning environment configured manually. This makes it practical for developers or system integrators who want reliable OCR output in JSON while avoiding the complexity of training or managing models by hand. Projects and wrappers built around PaddleOCR-json demonstrate how it can be integrated into other applications, such as desktop OCR utilities or language-specific bindings, because the JSON output is easy to parse and consume.

OCR Manga Reader is a free and open source Android app that allows you to quickly OCR and lookup Japanese words in real-time. It does not have ads or telemetry/spyware and does not require an Internet connection. Supports both EDICT and EPWING dictionaries. Requires Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or higher. See http://ocrmangareaderforandroid.sourceforge.net/ for details.