EasyOCR vs Tesseract OCR: What are the differences?

Both EasyOCR and Tesseract OCR are popular optical character recognition (OCR) tools that enable the extraction and recognition of text from images or scanned documents. Let's explore the key differences between them.

1. Ease of Use: EasyOCR focuses on simplicity and ease of use, providing an intuitive user interface and straightforward integration with various programming languages. On the other hand, Tesseract OCR is more complex and requires a higher level of technical expertise for proper implementation and customization.

2. Recognition Accuracy: While both OCR tools offer decent recognition accuracy, Tesseract OCR, being an open-source OCR engine, has undergone extensive community-driven development and improvements, which has resulted in higher accuracy rates compared to EasyOCR.

3. Language Support: EasyOCR supports a wide range of languages, including commonly used languages such as English, Spanish, Chinese, and French, as well as several less common languages. Tesseract OCR, on the other hand, boasts impressive language support with over 100 languages, including various scripts and non-Latin characters.

4. Training and Customization: Tesseract OCR provides robust options for training and customization. It allows users to fine-tune the OCR engine according to their specific requirements, making it a preferred choice for projects that demand extensive customization. EasyOCR, although not as flexible in terms of customization, offers a simple and out-of-the-box solution for most OCR needs.

5. Optical Character Recognition Techniques: EasyOCR utilizes a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models to recognize and extract text from images. In contrast, Tesseract OCR predominantly relies on a traditional OCR approach based on statistical and rule-based algorithms, although it has started integrating neural network-based models in recent versions.

6. Community Support and Documentation: Tesseract OCR has a vast and active user community, which provides extensive support, resources, and documentation. This ensures that users can find assistance and solutions to common issues easily. EasyOCR, while gaining popularity, may have a relatively smaller community and fewer available resources in comparison.

In summary, EasyOCR offers ease of use and good language support, while Tesseract OCR provides higher recognition accuracy, customization options, and a strong community support system.