Improving OCR of Form

[Travis DePriest]

https://www.slideshare.net/EdwardOHalloran1/officer-evaluation-form-20160908

How do I go about improving the OCR of the form above? I have tried a lot of methods, such as erasing the lines, cropping out individual rows, etc, and none seem to improve the tesseract OCR performance.

The biggest problem is the text that I need (the field) seems to do OK, but the surrounding identifier is sometimes poor, which makes extraction difficult using regex.

[Jeremy Young]

You won't like this, but ....

We had a similar problem and we tackled it by doing an initial OCR run to locate the words, then a really simple mickey-mouse process to look for lines between the words, and then use the detected lines to identify regions which we re-OCRd one-by-one.

Enjoy!

[Jeremy Young]

When I say Mickey-Mouse I mean looking for a series of black pixels in a line in the white-space between the words.

Works ok for a binary image ...