Does anyone know of some good open sourced projects for OCR? Tesseract always seems to be the default, and then it seems Google cloud, and other services are miles ahead. However, for those who don't want to rely on the big tech companies, are there any comparable alternatives?
I recently came across CRAFT wich appears to have come out of the ICDAR2017 Robust reading challenge.
It performed better than expected. I only tested a few images so please don't take my word for it.
That led me to PaddleOCR. There is still plenty of room for improvement but I found it way more convenient to use for my purposes than messing with Tesseract.