Free OCR Software - Extract text from Images

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OCR Tools, a division of File Innovations, presents a state-of-the-art Optical Character Recognition desktop utility that generates ASCII text from images such as a bitmap or image file. Incorporating Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, and trained with over 4 million font variations; our OCR utility incorporate the latest optical character recognition technology to solve all of your OCR problems. The utility is freeware. The registered version eliminates popup messages and advertising. Registered version removes popups and advertising..


Intelliant OCR is an optical character recognition commandline utility, able to convert scanned images into a searchable PDF format, including both image and text in a same standard container. This increases the value of your intellectual capital, allowing you to best utilize your image documents with any search engine. It is remarkably fast, light (the installator weighs only 5 Mb) and the recognition function makes quite a nice job for the main european languages. Several text and image compression methods allow to enormously reduce the size of the documents. Input images can be in all the flavours of the TIFF format, even already encapsulated in a PDF document. Intelliant OCR processes monochrome inputs, and now also supports gray level and colour documents. Output documents can be in ASCII format, smart ASCII (tries to produce text as much like the original image as possible), RTF and PDF. You can specify all security options and properties (title, author, subject and keywords) in the version 1.4 of Adobe PDF format.

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OCR stands for Optical character recognition. OCR software enables you to extract the text from a scanned image and convert it into an editable text document. So if you want to keep that interesting piece of article from a magazine you do not have to sit and type in the whole article. Just scan the article page and then use any OCR software to convert it into editable text. There are many OCR software available though most of them are commercial and costly. And it doesn’t make much sense to spend so much money on it especially if you’d be using it once in a bluemoon. Below is a list of freely available OCR software which does the job for you.

TopOCR
TopOCR is designed to be simple and user-friendly for use with your digital camera or smartphone. Now, wherever you go, you can create documents from business cards, newspapers, books and magazines, all without lugging around a notebook computer and scanner.
http://www.topocr.com/

FreeOCR.net V2.2
Softi FreeOCR is a complete scan and OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free ocr engine. 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.
http://softi.co.uk/freeocr.htm

Tesseract-ocr
The Tesseract OCR engine was one of the top 3 engines in the 1995 UNLV Accuracy test. Between 1995 and 2006 it had little work done on it, but it is probably one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available. The source code will read a binary, grey or color image and output text. A tiff reader is built in that will read uncompressed TIFF images, or libtiff can be added to read compressed images.
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

GOCR/JOCR
Developed under the GNU Public License. It converts scanned images of text back to text files.
http://jocr.sourceforge.net/

GOCR Windows Frontend 1.0
This frontend for GOCR is graphical and is designed to be simple to use, just select the graphics file that you want to recongnise, and the output will be shown to you. You can then copy this output and paste it to somewhere useful. Most major graphical file formats are supported.
http://www.brothersoft.com/gocr-windows-frontend-38579.html

OCR Desktop Application
A desktop utility that generates ASCII text from images such as a bitmap or image file. Incorporating Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, and trained with over 4 million font variations; our OCR utility incorporate the latest optical character recognition technology to solve your OCR problems. The utility is free for personal use, the registered version turns off popups and advertising.
http://www.ocrtools.com/fi/prdOCRFree.aspx

SimpleOCR
SimpleOCR is the popular freeware OCR software with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. SimpleOCR is also a royalty-free OCR SDK for developers to use in their custom applications.
If you have a scanner and want to avoid retyping your documents, SimpleOCR is the fast, free way to do it. The SimpleOCR freeware is 100% free and not limited in any way. Anyone can use SimpleOCR for free--home users, educational institutions, even corporate users.
http://www.simpleocr.com/

Ocrad - The GNU OCR
GNU Ocrad is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program based on a feature extraction method. It reads images in pbm (bitmap), pgm (greyscale) or ppm (color) formats and produces text in byte (8-bit) or UTF-8 formats.
http://www.gnu.org/software/ocrad/ocrad.html

If you have MS-Office you already have an OCR tool ready. You can use Microsoft Office Document Imaging as an OCR tool.