Transform an image of handwritten notes to text [closed]

Question

I have hundreds of images of handwritten notes. They were written from different people but they are in sequence so you know that for example person1 wrote img1.jpg -> img100.jpg. The style of handwriting varies a lot from person to person but there are parts of the notes which are always fixed, I imagine that could help an algorithm (it helps me!).

I tried tesseract and it failed pretty bad at recognizing the text. I'm thinking since each person has like 100 images is there an algorithm I can train by feeding it a small number of examples, like 5 or less and it can learn from that? Or would it not be enough data? From searching around it seems looks like I need to implement a CNN (e.g. this paper).

My knowledge of ai is limited though, is this something that I could still do using a library and some studying? If so, what should I do going forward?

Answer 1

There are many OCRs out there and some perform better than others. However, this is a field that has improved a lot recently with the Deep Neural Networks. I would consider using a Cloud provider such as Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon. Your upload the image and they return the metadata.

For instance: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/computer-vision/

If you don't want to use cloud services for any reason, I would consider using TensorFlow... but some knowledge is required:

Tensorflow model for OCR