Why Choose IronOCR Over Tesseract
Accuracy
Tesseract
- Tesseract is unable to handle images that are rotated, skewed, low DPI, scanned, or have background noise.
- It requires image pre-processing using Photoshop or ImageMagick.
- It can take a long time to process and often provides nonsensical information.
IronOCR
- IronOCR handles pre-processing and applies image filters to simplify the process.
- Users often achieve 99.8% to 100% accuracy with minimal configuration.
Image Compatibility
Tesseract
- Only accepts Leptonica PIX image format, which is an
IntPtrC++ object in C#. - PIX objects are not managed memory. Failure to handle them with care in C# results in memory leaks.
IronOCR
- Images are memory managed.
- Supports a broad range of image formats:
- MultiFrame TIFF
- JPEG & JPEG2000
- GIF
- PNG
- System.Drawing Bitmaps, Stream, and Byte Array/Binary image Data (
byte[])
- IronSoftware.System.Drawing is anticipated to replace reliance on System.Drawing, allowing a universal Bitmap format.
Performance
Tesseract
- Poorly documented settings that must be fine-tuned to achieve accuracy.
- Dependent on clean documents and pre-processed images.
IronOCR
- Works accurately with zero configuration for most images.
- Utilizes multithreading to fully leverage multi-core processors.
- Even low-resolution images generally yield high accuracy.
- No Photoshop required.
API
Tesseract
- Little to no support and not beginner-friendly:
- Requires working with Interop layers. Many found on GitHub are outdated with unresolved issues, memory leaks, and console warnings.
- May not support .NET Core or Standard.
- Working with the command line EXE is difficult to deploy and can be interrupted by virus scanners and security policies.
- Requires working with Interop layers. Many found on GitHub are outdated with unresolved issues, memory leaks, and console warnings.
IronOCR
- A managed and tested .NET Library for Tesseract called IronTesseract.
- Fully documented with IntelliSense support.
- Team of support engineers ready to assist.
Languages
Tesseract
- Supports only 100 languages.
IronOCR
- Supports over 127 built-in languages and allows for custom language pack support.
Conclusion
Tesseract is an excellent resource for C++ developers, but it is not a complete OCR library for .NET. Scanned or photographed images must be pre-processed to be orthogonal, standardized, high-resolution, and free of digital noise before Tesseract can accurately work with them.
In contrast, IronOCR can do this and more, with just a single line of code. IronOCR uses a very finely-tuned Tesseract for its internal OCR engine, built for C#, with a lot of performance improvements and features added as standard.
Chaknith works on IronXL and IronBarcode. He has deep expertise in C# and .NET, helping improve the software and support customers. His insights from user interactions contribute to better products, documentation, and overall experience.
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