Tesseract-ocr

Open source OCR engine, accepting uncompressed TIFF files as input
Homepage:	http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
License:	Apache 2.0 License EXCEPT the tesseractTrainer.py, which is licensed with GPL

Description

Quoted from the website: “The Tesseract OCR engine was one of the top 3 engines in the 1995 UNLV Accuracy test. Between 1995 and 2006 it had little work done on it, but it is probably one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available. The source code will read a binary, grey or color image and output text. A tiff reader is built in that will read uncompressed TIFF images, or libtiff can be added to read compressed images.”

User Experiences

Applied in an AQuA Mashup that resulted in the Solution page: Compare OCR results of the same source material in different formats (TIFF, JP2)