Easy Online OCR

OCR Software: How to Extract Text From an Image

Roboflow maintains a free OCR endpoint you can use to recognize characters in an image or video. The API is powered by DocTR, a machine learning-powered OCR model. The API allows you to retrieve the location of text in visual data. You can then retrieve the text in each location where text was found. You do not need any experience with computer vision to use this API.

The OCR endpoint is available for use in a hosted offering as well as on your device. The latter (running the model on your device) is useful if you need to run OCR in real time, or if you do not have access to a stable internet connection where you need to use OCR.

First, create a free Roboflow account. You can use your account to make 15,000 OCR API calls. Then follow this tutorial.

Use Popular OCR Software

Based on our model testing we found running EasyOCR locally produces the most cost-efficient OCR results while maintaining competitive accuracy, while Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus performed the best across the widest array of domains, and Google’s Gemini Pro 1.0 performs the best in terms of speed efficiency. When comparing against local, open-source OCR solutions, EasyOCR far outperformed its counterparts in all metrics, performing at levels near or above other LMMs.

Accuracy

Across the board, considering all domains, two multimodal LLMs, Gemini and Claude performed the best, followed by EasyOCR and GPT-4.

Speed

Gemini wins by a notable margin, with EasyOCR, and GPT-4 as runner-ups. Despite Calude’s high performance, its slow response time, negatively impacted its scores in this category.

Cost

EasyOCR had the best cost efficiency, with DocTR and Gemini being significantly lower runner-ups.