Showing posts with label Short. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Short. Show all posts
Tuesday, 18 August 2015
Tuesday, 23 July 2013
OCR makes short work of digitizing your docs
The file cabinet looms large in the office, yet it guards its secrets
jealously...even from you. It's time to convert those papers to space-saving,
easy-to-find digital documents. For that, you need a scanner to turn them into
digital images and an Optical Character Recognition program to convert those
images into editable and searchable documents. I took four of the latest OCR
programs and a free online OCR service for a test spin. All of them work to
varying degrees.
To test the programs, I ran 22 varied and not particularly clean scans of documents—including one hand-written note—through four OCR programs and one free service. I looked for accuracy in text recognition, image extraction, and the ability to recreate them in a Word document. In addition, I processed 264 separate scans from a yearbook for output as a searchable PDF.
You don't actually need to install OCR software if you need to convert only a couple of small documents. You can use a free service such as Free-OCR (also known as Free-OCR.com) and upload a scan of your document. File size is limited to 2MB and 5000 pixels in any direction, which is about 150 dpi for a standard page. The OCR engine handles 29 languages, including English.
Free-OCR makes you jump through a CAPTCHA hoop, but does it
apologetically.
To test the programs, I ran 22 varied and not particularly clean scans of documents—including one hand-written note—through four OCR programs and one free service. I looked for accuracy in text recognition, image extraction, and the ability to recreate them in a Word document. In addition, I processed 264 separate scans from a yearbook for output as a searchable PDF.
You don't actually need to install OCR software if you need to convert only a couple of small documents. You can use a free service such as Free-OCR (also known as Free-OCR.com) and upload a scan of your document. File size is limited to 2MB and 5000 pixels in any direction, which is about 150 dpi for a standard page. The OCR engine handles 29 languages, including English.
Although you don't have to register or even fork over your email address, the
Free-OCR site does make you fill in one of those annoying CAPTCHAs. (Thanks, Web
bad guys, for making everyone's life more difficult.) However, those CAPTCHAs
serve to remind one just how difficult OCR can be. If humans, with our
incredible heuristic abilities, occasionally have problems with these, just
think how poor straight-line software perusing a stream of bits must feel.
Free-OCR did a decent job of extracting the text from the test documents. With standard typed pages, you should have no problems as long as you don't have fancy plans for the scanned text: The site does not output files or recreate documents. It simply places the extracted text in a box for cutting and pasting. As a matter of fact, embedded graphics tend to confuse the output.
Free-OCR s text capture works well, but even simple graphics confuse the website. Free-OCR is not suitable for large jobs or overly complex documents, but when all you need is to quickly get the text out of a basic document scan, it will do nicely in most cases.
Tip: Use Microsoft Paint to reduce the size of any image you wish to use to 150 dpi.
FreeOCR is a nice, simple front-end for HP's public-domain Tesseract OCR engine (now used by Google) and is roughly the installable equivalent of the unrelated Free-OCR website. It interfaces directly with scanners in addition to importing image files, and it extracts text into a box from which you can cut and paste. The program is extremely easy to use and works well if all you want is text. It even extracts text from PDFs, though it exports only to text.
FreeOCR, though unrelated to Free-OCR, is just as easy to
use.
FreeOCR processes only one image at a time, but will OCR multi-page PDFs.
And, unlike the Free-OCR website, there's no limit on file size. Also, FreeOCR
can create Word and RTF documents from the text it extracts, but it's just
pasted text: There's no attempt to reconstruct the document or place images.
Read this dialog box and select your options carefully when clicking through FreeOCR's installation. As far as it goes, FreeOCR is a neat little program, though it tries to install toolbars and reset your browser home page. You can install the program while cancelling and declining all offers (though it's unintuitive and the negative response buttons are grayed out). If you couldn't do that, you wouldn't be reading about FreeOCR 4.2 in this roundup.
X is a busy character these days. Not only is it still used traditionally in words, it's featured in the end of movie credits as the Roman "10," and has achieved rock star status as shorthand for eXtreme. It's even used in the name of Acrobat XI. Best of all, it can be used to illustrate one the major tools available to OCR technologists for recognizing symbols: context, i.e., looking at what surrounds a character to help identify it.
Acrobat XI Standard is very good at leveraging context and does a bang-up job of recreating entire documents, including text, images, and layout, then outputting them as the increasingly popular editable PDFs, .RTF, and Word docs. If outputting documents that look like the original is your focus, it's great. It is, however, a little less aggressive and slightly less successful at extracting text from some images than Nuance OmniPage and Abbyy FineReader, which are reviewed below.
The Readiris OCR engine gives Adobe Acrobat XI an edge in
accuracy.
Acrobat XI lacks the side-by-side comparison of original documents with their
recreated doppelgangers that most programs offer: Word, RTF, and the like are
simply saved. However, the output files are very accurate (thanks to the
Readiris OCR engine), and you can fine-tune the results of PDFs in-line with the
"Find OCR suspects" function.
Although Acrobat XI is primarily for PDFs, its OCR is so good that you can easily forego an auxiliary OCR program if you buy it. But at $499 for the Pro version and $299 for Standard, it is expensive. OmniPage and FineReader perform OCR and handle the PDF basics for considerably less cash.
OmniPage 18 Standard ($150) is Acrobat XI's equal at outputting Word files and editable PDFs, and it also does a very good job of extracting pure text. By default, it's a tad aggressive at rotating images trying to find text to extract. However, you can disable this behavior in the settings dialog.
At defaults, Omnipage 18 Standard is a tad aggressive about rotating images. But you can turn this behavior off, and it did a great job making an editable version of my high-school yearbook.
Free-OCR did a decent job of extracting the text from the test documents. With standard typed pages, you should have no problems as long as you don't have fancy plans for the scanned text: The site does not output files or recreate documents. It simply places the extracted text in a box for cutting and pasting. As a matter of fact, embedded graphics tend to confuse the output.
Free-OCR s text capture works well, but even simple graphics confuse the website. Free-OCR is not suitable for large jobs or overly complex documents, but when all you need is to quickly get the text out of a basic document scan, it will do nicely in most cases.
Tip: Use Microsoft Paint to reduce the size of any image you wish to use to 150 dpi.
FreeOCR is a nice, simple front-end for HP's public-domain Tesseract OCR engine (now used by Google) and is roughly the installable equivalent of the unrelated Free-OCR website. It interfaces directly with scanners in addition to importing image files, and it extracts text into a box from which you can cut and paste. The program is extremely easy to use and works well if all you want is text. It even extracts text from PDFs, though it exports only to text.
Read this dialog box and select your options carefully when clicking through FreeOCR's installation. As far as it goes, FreeOCR is a neat little program, though it tries to install toolbars and reset your browser home page. You can install the program while cancelling and declining all offers (though it's unintuitive and the negative response buttons are grayed out). If you couldn't do that, you wouldn't be reading about FreeOCR 4.2 in this roundup.
X is a busy character these days. Not only is it still used traditionally in words, it's featured in the end of movie credits as the Roman "10," and has achieved rock star status as shorthand for eXtreme. It's even used in the name of Acrobat XI. Best of all, it can be used to illustrate one the major tools available to OCR technologists for recognizing symbols: context, i.e., looking at what surrounds a character to help identify it.
Acrobat XI Standard is very good at leveraging context and does a bang-up job of recreating entire documents, including text, images, and layout, then outputting them as the increasingly popular editable PDFs, .RTF, and Word docs. If outputting documents that look like the original is your focus, it's great. It is, however, a little less aggressive and slightly less successful at extracting text from some images than Nuance OmniPage and Abbyy FineReader, which are reviewed below.
Although Acrobat XI is primarily for PDFs, its OCR is so good that you can easily forego an auxiliary OCR program if you buy it. But at $499 for the Pro version and $299 for Standard, it is expensive. OmniPage and FineReader perform OCR and handle the PDF basics for considerably less cash.
OmniPage 18 Standard ($150) is Acrobat XI's equal at outputting Word files and editable PDFs, and it also does a very good job of extracting pure text. By default, it's a tad aggressive at rotating images trying to find text to extract. However, you can disable this behavior in the settings dialog.
At defaults, Omnipage 18 Standard is a tad aggressive about rotating images. But you can turn this behavior off, and it did a great job making an editable version of my high-school yearbook.
OmniPage features the side-by-side comparison editing of all types of files
that Acrobat's lacks, and its interface is bit more flexible than Abbyy
FineReader's, allowing you to arrange the various panes in more ways. Like
Acrobat, OmniPage also provides a batch manager for automating multiple jobs.
OmniPage Ultimate 19 is the real news for this industry stalwart. The new $500 Ultimate marries OCR with company's speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies from Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and starts a transition to a Windows 8-style interface. Though those aren't strictly OCR features, it does mean the program is morphing into a jack-of-all-trades translation tool. Maybe Nuance will even consider handwriting OCR in the future.
Anyone who's purchased a multifunction printer or scanner recently will probably recognize the name FineReader, as the Sprint version ships with many such products. Obviously, there are deals being made, but there's no questioning that the program also does a very nice job of OCR. Text extraction is great, though it's not quite as good at recreating complex documents in Word and RTF files as Acrobat or OmniPage.
Abbyy's dual-paned interface makes it easy to compare
originals to OCR.
FineReader is straightforward and easy to use. The main window shows a list
of images in a column to the far left, the image being processed in a pane next
to it, and the OCR'd text and elements in a pane on the right side. This
side-by-side arrangement, shared with OmniPage, makes it super-easy to spot
mistakes and compare page elements.
Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional is fast, recognizes text in 189 languages, and outputs in a number of different formats including ePub, editable PDFs, Microsoft Word, and even open-source PDF competitor DjVu.
FineReader created a searchable PDF of my yearbook scans just fine, but like OmniPage, it was over-zealous at rotating images trying to find text until I turned off this feature. With most OCR programs, you're better off using Windows' own Photo Viewer to rotate scans to their correct orientation before OCR'ing.
While the $170 Professional Edition that I tested slightly more expensive than OmniPage Standard, it is also available in a capable $50 Express 9 version.
OCR programs are as useless unless they have digitized images to work with. For that, you need a scanner.
A fast sheet-fed scanner that scans both sides of the page simultaneously is worth its weight in gold for anyone with lots of two-sided business documents to transfer into the digital domain. HP's Scanjet Professionals or Fujitsu's ScanSnaps are available for under $500.
A garden-variety A4/letter-sized flatbed scanner such as Canon's $200 CanoScan 9000F or similar is great for small to standard-sized photos, magazine articles, etc.
For oversized books, such as atlases or the high-school yearbook used in my testing, you'll need something that handles larger documents. I used Plustek's pricey but fast $600 Optic Pro A320. Mustek makes a variety of cheaper, albeit slower large-format scanners.
TIp: Most scanners bundle competent, albeit less comprehensive, versions of the software we've covered. Grab your scanner first, then see if you need to upgrade the software.
If PDFs are your focus, then Acrobat XI is a very good choice, though you'll pay a lot for either Standard or Pro. Most users will be just fine with the less expensive OmniPage Standard 18 or Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional version. OmniPage gets a slight nod if you're outputting RTF or Word documents, but it's otherwise a tie.
OmniPage Ultimate 19 is the real news for this industry stalwart. The new $500 Ultimate marries OCR with company's speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies from Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and starts a transition to a Windows 8-style interface. Though those aren't strictly OCR features, it does mean the program is morphing into a jack-of-all-trades translation tool. Maybe Nuance will even consider handwriting OCR in the future.
Anyone who's purchased a multifunction printer or scanner recently will probably recognize the name FineReader, as the Sprint version ships with many such products. Obviously, there are deals being made, but there's no questioning that the program also does a very nice job of OCR. Text extraction is great, though it's not quite as good at recreating complex documents in Word and RTF files as Acrobat or OmniPage.
Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional is fast, recognizes text in 189 languages, and outputs in a number of different formats including ePub, editable PDFs, Microsoft Word, and even open-source PDF competitor DjVu.
FineReader created a searchable PDF of my yearbook scans just fine, but like OmniPage, it was over-zealous at rotating images trying to find text until I turned off this feature. With most OCR programs, you're better off using Windows' own Photo Viewer to rotate scans to their correct orientation before OCR'ing.
While the $170 Professional Edition that I tested slightly more expensive than OmniPage Standard, it is also available in a capable $50 Express 9 version.
OCR programs are as useless unless they have digitized images to work with. For that, you need a scanner.
A fast sheet-fed scanner that scans both sides of the page simultaneously is worth its weight in gold for anyone with lots of two-sided business documents to transfer into the digital domain. HP's Scanjet Professionals or Fujitsu's ScanSnaps are available for under $500.
A garden-variety A4/letter-sized flatbed scanner such as Canon's $200 CanoScan 9000F or similar is great for small to standard-sized photos, magazine articles, etc.
For oversized books, such as atlases or the high-school yearbook used in my testing, you'll need something that handles larger documents. I used Plustek's pricey but fast $600 Optic Pro A320. Mustek makes a variety of cheaper, albeit slower large-format scanners.
TIp: Most scanners bundle competent, albeit less comprehensive, versions of the software we've covered. Grab your scanner first, then see if you need to upgrade the software.
If PDFs are your focus, then Acrobat XI is a very good choice, though you'll pay a lot for either Standard or Pro. Most users will be just fine with the less expensive OmniPage Standard 18 or Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional version. OmniPage gets a slight nod if you're outputting RTF or Word documents, but it's otherwise a tie.
Thursday, 4 July 2013
Jimmy Choo Debuts Short Film Starring Nicole Kidman
“Nicole’s character portrays the multi-faceted qualities of the Jimmy Choo woman for this season -- strong, sexy with a beguiling sense of mystery,” Jimmy Choo creative director Sandra Choi said in a statement.
Added Kidman: “I really enjoyed being able to play a role that was strong, sexy and in control. I got into a relationship with the photographer and Mikael is very intuitive. He knows what I am thinking and feeling and is able to translate it through the camera.”
The print campaign, which coincides with the short film, will appear in print beginning in August. Kidman is set to take on another Hitchcock heroine when she returns to the big screen as Grace Kelly in The Weinstein Company’s Grace of Monaco, which hits theaters in December.
Thursday, 27 June 2013
Miley Cyrus Steps Out in Chicago Bulls Jersey and Short Shorts
She can't stop. Miley Cyrus is known for her provocative, carefree looks, but this risque daytime ensemble is a real head-scratcher. The leggy stunner stepped out on Sunday, June 23, in L.A. wearing a backwards baseball hat, a Chicago Bulls basketball jersey, white shorts so teeny-tiny they were barely visible, and Saint Laurent striped ankle-strap high-heel sandals.
PHOTOS: Miley Cyrus' very short shorts
The singer accessorized with several strands of gold necklaces, stacked rings and bracelets, and a chunky, blinged-out watch. Red lipstick and matching long red nails completed the bold look.
PHOTOS: Miley's raciest outfits
Short shorts have become a wardrobe staple for the uninhibited singer, who's been frequently spotted rocking tight daisy dukes, but her hemlines seem to be creeping up even higher lately. In her video for her new single "We Can't Stop," she dances and writhes in various revealing ensembles, including a white leotard onesie.
PHOTOS: Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth's love story
This isn't the first time Cyrus has shown some love for a Chicago sports team. The songstress tweeted a shot of herself last week wearing a Chicago White Sox jersey, high heels, and — naturally — no pants.
Tell Us: Do you like her outfit?
Tuesday, 25 June 2013
Cinedigm and Demarest Launch Partnership With Release of 'Short Term 12'
South by Southwest 2013 Grand Jury and audience winner Short Term 12 will be the first movie released under a new co-acquisition and distribution partnership between Demarest Films and Cinedigm, it was announced Tuesday.
Short Term 12, a drama about a twentysomething woman (Brie Larson) working in a foster home, will be theatrically released by Cinedigm on Aug. 23 and will be released in ancillary markets in early 2014. The film also stars Kaitlyn Dever, John Gallagher Jr., Rami Malek and newcomer Keith Stanfield.
The companies envision doing expanded independent film acquisitions, marketing and distribution in the future.
“This arrangement is truly unique as it’s not a traditional distribution or production relationship – it’s a fully fledged partnership that allows us to share equally in the upsides of our indie films, from theatrical all the way throught the vast ancillary opportunities our distribution expertise and infrastructure provides,” says Cinedigm CEO Chris McGurk. “It’s great to be working with such an innovative team, and this arrangement should expand acquisition opportunities for both parties in the future.”
“Cinedigm is on the cutting edge of the independent film renaissance, and we are thrilled to be partnering with them and tapping into the vast potential that digital distribution provides,” said Sam Englebardt, co-founder and CEO of Demarest Films, adding: “We expect this to be the first of many films that we co-release with Cinedigm and a model that we are excited to replicate with other distribution partners as well.”
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