The 0.7.1a version of OCRFeeder has been released.

This version introduces some tasks performed by Emergya as part of the GuadaLinfo Accessible project, such as:
* Importation from a scanner device.
* Copying text from the content boxes to the clipboard.
* Users can now use the typical spell-checker dialog to correct mistakes in the text recognized by the OCR engines.

Other highlights include:

* Rewritten ocrfeeder-cli (which also introduces a help method now)
* Added the automatic detection of the Cuneiform OCR engine
* Move the OCRFeeder modules to its own folder (so it is better organized and doesn’t conflict with other modules when installing it)

And some bug fixing:

* Add the help option to ocrfeeder-cli (gb#630829)
* Fix selecting all areas
* Fix ellipsis and title in the queued events dialog
* Prevent “invisible” boxes creation
* Remove temporary images for the Tesseract OCR engine

A big thanks to the great GNOME translators for keeping OCRFeeder available in a number of languages and to Berto for making it available in Debian (which later got into Ubuntu as well).

Just as I was releasing the 0.7.1a version I realized the spell-checker.ui file was not being installed so I quickly did a tiny release, hence the 0.7.1a and not simply 0.7.1.

Download OCRFeeder 0.7.1a source tarball

I have been hacking on some new and cool features on OCRFeeder for a while and now it is time to show them to the world in a new release.

These features I’m talking about fall mainly in 2 areas: improving the a11y of the UI and improving the recognition of documents.

A11y Improvement

The improvement of the a11y has the typical UI changes to include mnemonics, missing labels and relations, but also other approaches that have more to do with UX like using a progress dialog to inform users that time-taking operations are being carried. This means that now, the PDF importation and OCR won’t block the UI.
Other changes in this category were the navigation through the content boxes (before, these could only be selected by clicking on them), the selection of all boxes and the deletion of selected boxes.

The following screenshot shows the box editor area of OCRFeeder with its mnemonics highlighted:

Box edition area

Recognition Improvements

Sometimes, text columns are so close to each other that they end up being recognized as a single paragraph, so I added a post-detection method to solve this issue. This feature is optional and can be toggled from the Preferences dialog.

Here’s an example of the difference it makes:

Before columns' detection improvements

After columns' detection improvements

Scanned document images are usually skewed and this makes it more difficult for the contents to be successfully detected and “OCRed”. I decided to implement an algorithm to deskew these images. The algorithm uses the Hough transform to try to find lines in the image and their angles and, while it is a bit slow, it works well:

Skewed image

Deskewed image

This action can be used in a loaded image but can also be configured to be automatically performed before the images are added. The Unpaper tool can now also be set to be clean images before adding them.
This makes it much easier to successfully recognize images obtained from a scanner device.

Some fine tunning of the content boxes’ bounds was done by trying to shorten their margins, that is, lowering the distance between the boxes and their actual contents.

The font size recognition was also tweaked to solve the problem of having paragraphs with initials (you know, the huge starting characters) which were influencing the whole paragraphs’ font size.

To finish the recognition’s improvements, I have added an optional action to find and fix the text’s line breaks. Usually, OCR engines don’t consider “semantic line-breaks”, that is, OCR engines always insert a newline in the end of each line.
Using some regular expressions, I try to find these “fake” line-breaks and recover the original flow of the text. Like some of the features mentioned above, this one can also be turned on/off from the Preferences dialog.

Here’s how the Preferences dialog looks like now:

To finish, images can now be dragged and dropped onto the pages’ area and the mouse wheel can be used to scroll horizontally combining it with the Shift key, thanks to Stefan Löffler, and of course, several bugs were corrected and code was improved.

As you see, this is a “rich” new version of OCRFeeder that keeps being the easiest way to use OCR in a desktop. You are welcome to file bugs in bugzilla or to send patches and features’ requests to its mailing list or approaching me if you’re in GUADEC.

Download: OCRFeeder 0.7 tarball on GNOME FTP

Yesterday was the last day of the 7th edition of GUADEC Hispana, originally to be organized in Chile but due to the disastrous earthquake, it was moved to the city of Corunna, Spain.

Between hacking on OCRFeeder (expect a new version soon), giving a talk about it, attending nice presentations and chatting with people, I had a great time.
Diego’s presentation about Epiphany was simply epic and Mario gave a very complete crash course of git.

I guess there’s a first time for these things but Thursday, while I was giving a demo of the new OCRFeeder’s features, it crashed on me… Never again will I laugh at Mr. Gates and friends when their products freeze out of the blue (nah, it is too funny).
Now that I think of it… was this the first time a Portuguese man gave a talk at GUADEC Hispana?

The presentation was a cut-down version of the one I gave at FOSDEM this year and you can check its slides below (it’s in Spanish):

(thanks to Manuel Rego for reviewing my Spanish in the slides)

Here’s the group photo of the GUADEC ES attendants:

And from next Monday on, I’ll be in Den Haag for GUADEC 2010. My lightening talk about the Predictor Input Method got accepted, so if you’re into this kind of stuff, I hope to see you there.

One more year, Igalia will give me the chance and the pleasure to attend GUADEC one more year, this time in Den Haag.

My fellow Igalians Iago, Alejandro Piñeiro and José Dapena will give talks about Grilo, Cally and Modest 4, respectively.

As for me, I’m hoping my lightening talk about Text Prediction on GNOME gets accepted.

So, as usual, if you wanna talk about GNOME, OCR, Input Methods, Grilo, Django or Free Software in general and have beer while we’re on it, come along!

Hope to see you in Den Haag.

OCRFeeder version 0.6.6 has been released.

This version has no big improvements and exists mainly to introduce the fix of a bug that prevented using the algorithm for recognizing documents automatically.

The copyright was updated to include the proper copyright and license notices of ODFPy, which ships with OCRFeeder.
It also features some improvements to Debian related files (thanks to Alberto Garcia, who is creating the official deb package for Debian) and a few translation updates.

See the whole list of changes here.

Your usual links:
OCRFeeder’s git
OCRFeeder’s bugzilla
OCRFeeder’s Tarball from GNOME’s FTP
OCRFeeder 0.6.6 Debian package