There are all kinds of reasons why you might want to extract text out of images. Maybe you've taken photos of restaurant bills and you want to make a record of what you've eaten; or perhaps you've got a bunch of screenshots that you need to get product names out of; or you could have scanned in some important documents that need sorting. Whatever the reason, Windows comes with built-in tools for picking out text from image files (technically known as OCR, or Optical Character Recognition)--in fact, there are several different ways, so you can pick the one that suits you best. Here's how to get started, assuming you already have your images saved somewhere. The Snipping Tool is the easiest way to extract text from images on Windows.

Scoring the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has witnessed growing interest recently. Existing benchmarks have highlighted the impressive performance of LMMs in text recognition; however, their abilities on certain challenging tasks, such as text localization, handwritten content extraction, and logical reasoning, remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce OCRBench v2, a large-scale bilingual text-centric benchmark with currently the most comprehensive set of tasks (4x more tasks than the previous multi-scene benchmark OCRBench), the widest coverage of scenarios (31 diverse scenarios including street scene, receipt, formula, diagram, and so on), and thorough evaluation metrics, with a total of 10,000 human-verified question-answering pairs and a high proportion of difficult samples. After carefully benchmarking state-of-the-art LMMs on OCRBench v2, we find that 20 out of 22 LMMs score below 50 (100 in total) and suffer from five-type limitations, including less frequently encountered text recognition, fine-grained perception, layout perception, complex element parsing, and logical reasoning. The benchmark and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/Yuliang-liu/MultimodalOCR.

This paper presents the Visual Optical Recognition Telemetry EXtraction (VORTEX) system for extracting and analyzing drone telemetry data from First Person View (FPV) Uncrewed Aerial System (UAS) footage. VORTEX employs MMOCR, a PyTorch-based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) toolbox, to extract telemetry variables from drone Heads Up Display (HUD) recordings, utilizing advanced image preprocessing techniques, including CLAHE enhancement and adaptive thresholding. The study optimizes spatial accuracy and computational efficiency through systematic investigation of temporal sampling rates (1s, 5s, 10s, 15s, 20s) and coordinate processing methods. Results demonstrate that the 5-second sampling rate, utilizing 4.07% of available frames, provides the optimal balance with a point retention rate of 64% and mean speed accuracy within 4.2% of the 1-second baseline while reducing computational overhead by 80.5%. Comparative analysis of coordinate processing methods reveals that while UTM Zone 33N projection and Haversine calculations provide consistently similar results (within 0.1% difference), raw WGS84 coordinates underestimate distances by 15-30% and speeds by 20-35%. Altitude measurements showed unexpected resilience to sampling rate variations, with only 2.1% variation across all intervals. This research is the first of its kind, providing quantitative benchmarks for establishing a robust framework for drone telemetry extraction and analysis using open-source tools and spatial libraries.

This paper introduces LMRPA, a novel Large Model-Driven Robotic Process Automation (RPA) model designed to greatly improve the efficiency and speed of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tasks. Traditional RPA platforms often suffer from performance bottlenecks when handling high-volume repetitive processes like OCR, leading to a less efficient and more time-consuming process. LMRPA allows the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve the accuracy and readability of extracted text, overcoming the challenges posed by ambiguous characters and complex text structures.Extensive benchmarks were conducted comparing LMRPA to leading RPA platforms, including UiPath and Automation Anywhere, using OCR engines like Tesseract and DocTR. The results are that LMRPA achieves superior performance, cutting the processing times by up to 52\%. For instance, in Batch 2 of the Tesseract OCR task, LMRPA completed the process in 9.8 seconds, where UiPath finished in 18.1 seconds and Automation Anywhere finished in 18.7 seconds. Similar improvements were observed with DocTR, where LMRPA outperformed other automation tools conducting the same process by completing tasks in 12.7 seconds, while competitors took over 20 seconds to do the same. These findings highlight the potential of LMRPA to revolutionize OCR-driven automation processes, offering a more efficient and effective alternative solution to the existing state-of-the-art RPA models.

Background: Formulation, associated with suicide risk assessment, is an individualised process that seeks to understand the idiosyncratic nature and development of an individual's problems. Auditing clinical documentation on an electronic health record (EHR) is challenging as it requires resource-intensive manual efforts to identify keywords in relevant sections of specific forms. Furthermore, clinicians and healthcare professionals often do not use keywords; their clinical language can vary greatly and may contain various jargon and acronyms. Also, the relevant information may be recorded elsewhere. This study describes how we developed advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms, a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to analyse EHR data automatically. Method: Advanced Optical Character Recognition techniques were used to process unstructured data sets, such as portable document format (pdf) files. Free text data was cleaned and pre-processed using Normalisation of Free Text techniques. We developed algorithms and tools to unify the free text. Finally, the formulation was checked for the presence of each concept based on similarity using NLP-powered semantic matching techniques. Results: We extracted information indicative of formulation and assessed it to cover the relevant concepts. This was achieved using a Weighted Score to obtain a Confidence Level. Conclusion: The rigour to which formulation is completed is crucial to effectively using EHRs, ensuring correct and timely identification, engagement and interventions that may potentially avoid many suicide attempts and suicides.

Despite rapid advancements in TTS models, a consistent and robust human evaluation framework is still lacking. For example, MOS tests fail to differentiate between similar models, and CMOS's pairwise comparisons are time-intensive. The MUSHRA test is a promising alternative for evaluating multiple TTS systems simultaneously, but in this work we show that its reliance on matching human reference speech unduly penalises the scores of modern TTS systems that can exceed human speech quality. More specifically, we conduct a comprehensive assessment of the MUSHRA test, focusing on its sensitivity to factors such as rater variability, listener fatigue, and reference bias. Based on our extensive evaluation involving 492 human listeners across Hindi and Tamil we identify two primary shortcomings: (i) reference-matching bias, where raters are unduly influenced by the human reference, and (ii) judgement ambiguity, arising from a lack of clear fine-grained guidelines. To address these issues, we propose two refined variants of the MUSHRA test. The first variant enables fairer ratings for synthesized samples that surpass human reference quality. The second variant reduces ambiguity, as indicated by the relatively lower variance across raters. By combining these approaches, we achieve both more reliable and more fine-grained assessments. We also release MANGO, a massive dataset of 246,000 human ratings, the first-of-its-kind collection for Indian languages, aiding in analyzing human preferences and developing automatic metrics for evaluating TTS systems.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology has revolutionized the digitization of printed text, enabling efficient data extraction and analysis across various domains. Just like Machine Translation systems, OCR systems are prone to errors. In this work, we address the challenge of data generation and post-OCR error correction, specifically for low-resource languages. We propose an approach for synthetic data generation for Devanagari languages, RoundTripOCR, that tackles the scarcity of the post-OCR Error Correction datasets for low-resource languages. We release post-OCR text correction datasets for Hindi, Marathi, Bodo, Nepali, Konkani and Sanskrit. We also present a novel approach for OCR error correction by leveraging techniques from machine translation. Our method involves translating erroneous OCR output into a corrected form by treating the OCR errors as mistranslations in a parallel text corpus, employing pre-trained transformer models to learn the mapping from erroneous to correct text pairs, effectively correcting OCR errors.

Automatic detection of prominence at the word and syllable-levels is critical for building computer-assisted language learning systems. It has been shown that prosody embeddings learned by the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-speech (TTS) systems could generate word- and syllable-level prominence in the synthesized speech as natural as in native speech. To understand the effectiveness of prosody embeddings from TTS for prominence detection under nonnative context, a comparative analysis is conducted on the embeddings extracted from native and non-native speech considering the prominence-related embeddings: duration, energy, and pitch from a SOTA TTS named FastSpeech2. These embeddings are extracted under two conditions considering: 1) only text, 2) both speech and text. For the first condition, the embeddings are extracted directly from the TTS inference mode, whereas for the second condition, we propose to extract from the TTS under training mode. Experiments are conducted on native speech corpus: Tatoeba, and non-native speech corpus: ISLE. For experimentation, word-level prominence locations are manually annotated for both corpora. The highest relative improvement on word \& syllable-level prominence detection accuracies with the TTS embeddings are found to be 13.7% & 5.9% and 16.2% & 6.9% compared to those with the heuristic-based features and self-supervised Wav2Vec-2.0 representations, respectively.

Document comparison typically relies on optical character recognition (OCR) as its core technology. However, OCR requires the selection of appropriate language models for each document and the performance of multilingual or hybrid models remains limited. To overcome these challenges, we propose text change detection (TCD) using an image comparison model tailored for multilingual documents. Unlike OCR-based approaches, our method employs word-level text image-to-image comparison to detect changes. Our model generates bidirectional change segmentation maps between the source and target documents. To enhance performance without requiring explicit text alignment or scaling preprocessing, we employ correlations among multi-scale attention features. We also construct a benchmark dataset comprising actual printed and scanned word pairs in various languages to evaluate our model. We validate our approach using our benchmark dataset and public benchmarks Distorted Document Images and the LRDE Document Binarization Dataset. We compare our model against state-of-the-art semantic segmentation and change detection models, as well as to conventional OCR-based models.

Human speech exhibits rich and flexible prosodic variations. To address the one-to-many mapping problem from text to prosody in a reasonable and flexible manner, we propose DiffStyleTTS, a multi-speaker acoustic model based on a conditional diffusion module and an improved classifier-free guidance, which hierarchically models speech prosodic features, and controls different prosodic styles to guide prosody prediction. Experiments show that our method outperforms all baselines in naturalness and achieves superior synthesis speed compared to three diffusion-based baselines. Additionally, by adjusting the guiding scale, DiffStyleTTS effectively controls the guidance intensity of the synthetic prosody.