It seems like with the current progress in ML models, doing OCR should be an easy task. After all, recognizing handwritten numbers was one of the prime benchmarks for image recognition (MNIST was released in 1994).

Yet, when I try to OCR any of my handwritten notes all I ever get is a jumbled mess of nonsense. Am I missing something, is my handwriting really that atrocious or is it the models?

Here’s a quick example, a random passage from a scientific article:

I tried EasyOCR, Tesseract, PPOCR and a few online tools. Only PPOCR was able to correctly identify the numbers and the words “J.” and “Chem.”. The rest is just a random mess of characters.

Edit: thank you all for shitting on my handwriting. That was not asked for, and also not helpful. That sample was intentionally “not nice” but is how I would write a note for myself. (You should see how my notes look like when I don’t need to read them again, lol)

chatGPT can transcribe it perfectly, and also works on a slightly larger sample. Deepseek works ok-ish but made some mistakes, and gemini is apparently not available in my country atm. I guess the context awareness is what makes those models better in transcription, and also why I can read it back without problems.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    2·
    4 hours ago

    “Quick example” might be the key here. I was making some notes on something earlier today and my brain was putting out letters faster than my hand could keep up and I got letterforms not entirely unlike yours. Far too used to typing where each letter takes almost exactly the same amount of time to “write”.

    I had to remind myself to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n. Letter by letter. Make them neat. If you have attention span issues like me, it’s painful, but when the letters take shape it almost soothes that beast. But not quite in my case and so back to rushing again.

    But it’s plain as day on the page where I slowed down. The letters look almost machine-printed by comparison. Next to an actual machine print, they’re still pretty bad, but you know. Better than the middle of that wide gap between perfect machine and rushed squiggles.

    The other thing with typing in the computer age is that there’s this wonderful invention called the backspace key. When you’re hurriedly writing with pen or pencil, backspace isn’t a thing, so a writer is more likely to think “eh, close enough” and plough on. There are definitely a few full words crossed out and rewritten in my notes where it really bothered me though.