In this post, you will read about image reader (OCR) Firefox add-on. OCR is the acronym for optical character recognition. It has the power to read text of an image. In a world full of technologies, who would like to reprint or edit the whole content of the document? It takes much effort and time. People nowadays are totally involved in technology. In order to save time and get the work done itself, they look for innovations.
This add-on can read scanned document, text from paper and scanned text image. The add-on can read image text in more than 60 languages. This add-on acquires languages from Github repo and has built-in Javascript. Apart from Firefox, it works in Chrome, and Opera also.
I tested this add-on in Firefox. It enables the user to transfer file in OCR image reader system and lets the user edit scanned documents. There are many OCR image reader system available online but this Firefox add-on is advanced. It extracts all the text from an image in various languages. Make sure that you select the language first and then browse to add the file for translation. Thereafter, wait until the OCR engine reads the image text into the machine and then you can edit to make it right.
How Does This Firefox OCR Add-on Work to Extract Text from Images?
Once you add this add-on in Firefox, a logo appears next to the address bar with ‘A’ alphabet within a box at the top right corner. You may enable or disable it later as per your preference. Before browsing any file, you have to select a language first. Default language is set to English. But in case, you want to read image text in some other language then you may select that specific language.
Thereafter, you can jump to the next step. Browse the file from your system in order to extract words from the image. It includes other types of document such as scanned images, text paper, etc. This OCR system detects text from the document and reads them all. You can have a look below of an image which I had in my device without translation.
I added the above image having text content in this add-on. With the help of its OCR engine, it read the text content in a few seconds. As you can see in the below screenshot, the add-on offers to edit the content here itself which I found to be a very good feature.
There are many OCR software and other similar tools. However, the result may vary as they do not provide accurate text. The results are based on the quality of an image. If an image is blurry then it might not read text accurately. Inaccuracy also may be caused by stylish fonts, extra-small fonts, cursive handwriting. If an image has clear text, it will read it quickly and provide an accurate result.
Unfortunately, you may find some bugs in this add-on. The OCR system can make you wait while browsing for a file. The add-on takes more time while converting text into another language apart from English.
In brief
This OCR system is considered the best OCR engine among others because of two reasons. Firstly, it can read and convert text in more than 60 languages which no other OCR system offers. Secondly, you can edit an image having text content within the add-on. You can also take advantage of this technology by downloading this add-on.
