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
Platforms:	LInux, Windows, MacOSX

Description

Tesseract is probably the most accurate open source OCR engine available. Combined with the Leptonica Image Processing Library it can read a wide variety of image formats and convert them to text in over 60 languages. It 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 since then it has been improved extensively by Google.

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)