On the other hand, the OCR.space OCR API has a very strict privacy policy:
https://ocr.space/privacypolicy - All uploaded images and the extracted text are deleted immediatly after processing.
It looks like many free extensions either have malware in them from the start or get sold to malware companies later on, who then deploy the malware via updates:
http://lifehacker.com/many-browser-extensions-have-become-ad...
Here are archived versions of the URLs mentioned in the issue:
Without "partner extension": http://archive.is/anu2E
With "partner extension": http://archive.is/bp93l
As is evident, what their "partner extension" does is in fact maliciously hijacking and replacing ad-space on websites visited by the user.
Strangely, searching for their name among the issues on GitHub does not show other such results. I guess they usually make contact directly and that the person at that company who filed this issue did not realize it would be visible to the public.
Here is the full text of the issue:
> Adnow is interested in byuiing your extension traffic #1
> Dear Kyong Tsu,
> My name is Anastasia, I am a manager from international advertising network Adnow.
> Extension traffic is a hot trend nowadays, and we are interested in buying traffic from Facebook Video Downloader extension and the others. We are ready to share an idea of monetization extensions with you and give you a method.
> We offer:
> * high payouts
> * 100% fill rate (we buy traffic from all over the world)
> * Integration through JS Tag / XML / JSON feed
> * Integration method
> That's how the page looks without partner extension: https://gyazo.com/5d635a9dc7bdc142e18e6775a1d1340d
> And that's how it looks for user with our plugin/code in extension: https://gyazo.com/a2b48b16d304a3ba37cdf6967fa4d9d8
> Please contact me in case you are interested in monetization your extensions.
> I am looking forward to your answer.
> Thank you in advance.
> Best regards,
> --
> Anastasia Nova
> Sales manager | Adnow LLP
> e.: tasya@sales.adnow.com
> Skype: tasya@adnow.com
[1]: https://github.com/KyongTsu/TabMemorySaver/issues/1
Archived snapshot of above issue: http://archive.is/Z5mJl
I started using it a bit ago, the area selection seems a bit wonky, but otherwise works.
It is beyond irresponsible for mozilla to do nothing to prevent this malware from being recommended on their platform.
Look down the bottom.
It uploads everything to a commercial OCR service. Which provides these CPU cycles 'for free'.
Who owns this data? Do you have a privacy agreement with ocr.space? Can you trust them as far as you could spit?
It doesn't matter that this is documented though. Unless it had a popup banner EVERY TIME YOU USED IT saying "Your data will be sent to a cloud service for OCR, which may keep/index/sell you data without restriction."
Are you misunderstanding the extension or am I missing something bigger?
E: A total guess: "the server will see the image you are trying to OCR"? That's about as much privacy as I could see being intruded upon.
It is good that it isn't scanning everything, i.e. complete exfiltration, but that is a low bar. It leaks every time you use it.
Abbyy (best recognition rate but by far most expensive), Google Cloud Vision (second best recognition rate), Microsoft OCR and... our OCR.space service with a very generous free tier and a competitive priced PRO tier.
They should have an API to point to. It is fairly accurate. I use them occasionally via ShareX, which uses their API for OCR.
If your images however differ from the typical text document, recognition from those services will fail. OCR is highly dependent on the particular application and the kind of images that you're dealing with. Preprocessing and segmentation are very important.
If you need a custom solution, my email is in my profile.
But how's the accuracy here? Cause when I used previous plugins for this functionality, I often found they'd return gibberish if the text was even slightly ambiguous looking in image form.
How does it compare to the other plugins doing the same thing here?
> For extension gurus: You might have heard of Project Naptha, a great addon that applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. Copyfish solves the same problem, but it takes a different user interface approach. It does not try to alter the website. Instead, it lets you mark the text in the image that you want to extract. As a result Copyfish works with every website, even videos and PDF documents.
Thanks for making this!
I saw the first example screenshot on the page was a Chinese movie and thought "Great, it does"
I saw the enlarged version of the screenshot and the Chinese subtitles contain multiple mistakes: "Nice try, but maybe not so great after all for the use case I'd personally be interested in".
The tricky part for the OCR in this example is the diverse background, as the Chinese characters are directly inside the movie.
Your comment is interesting, as the original motivation for creating the Copyfish extension was to help me watch Chinese movies. So I can confirm that for this purpose, it works fine. Of course, once in a while it gets some characters wrong but it works ok with many movies.
Here is a screencast of Copyfish doing subtitle OCR:
Wondering what you're using for OCR?
For developers: Copyfish is published under the
GPL open-source license. As OCR software, it uses
the free OCR API from https://ocr.space/Neat! Brother. +1 =100 Ace