Comments on: OCR for Line Drawings?

By: Thomas Staub

Thomas Staub — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:40:44 +0000

www.autotracer.org is another online service for image vectorization. The results are not as good as those of Vector Magic. But therefore it is still free.

By: Neil

Neil — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:15:01 +0000

I’ve used Photoshop’s edge detection filters when scanning maps. I’m not sure how useful it is in creating separate line objects.

I think ‘sharpen’ can be used too.

By: Mike Fletcher

Mike Fletcher — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:09:33 +0000

IIRC Inkscape has a tracer embedded these days. I haven’t used that kind of stuff in a few years (and then I used Corel), but if you’re mostly talking about line drawings with a bit of text, you should be able to get the line drawings fairly easily and then just re-type the text.

HTH

By: jim mccoy

jim mccoy — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:59:41 +0000

You are looking for “vector tracing” programs. There are some free ones out there if you hunt around. Vector Magic (originally a stanford project that spun out to a commercial version) lets you do some free traces via a web app so you can see how well it might work. If it turns out to work well then the paid desktop version might be a better choice for bulk tracing.

By: Christopher Lambacher

Christopher Lambacher — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:35:35 +0000

Corel Draw comes with a tool to do this called PowerTRACE.
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/ca/en/Product/1191272117978#trace

I don’t know what the quality is or if there are open source options. But maybe that gives you a starting point.

By: pv

pv — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:28:21 +0000

If I understand correctly what you want to do, the keyword is “tracing”. Some free tools:

http://potrace.sourceforge.net/

http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/

and probably there are many more. Can’t say whether the quality vs. size tradeoff is acceptable in figures generated by these.

By: stani

stani — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:56:17 +0000

Would bitmap to vector convertors be enough? One I remember is potrace:
http://potrace.sourceforge.net/

By: jrrmzz

jrrmzz — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:19:56 +0000

Adobe Illustrator does a pretty good job of turning hand sketches and other sorts of scans into vector art. It’s not free but I’m sure the university has discounts for it…

By: zak

zak — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:49:26 +0000

Vector magic (http://vectormagic.com/home) can convert your images to svg. I don’t think it will actually save any labor, but it will put it into a nicer format that’s easier to edit. They have a handy web interface so you don’t even need to download the software to try it. I’ve used it once before and it did a pretty good job.

By: David Boddie

David Boddie — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:36:36 +0000

AutoTrace might be a good first step:

http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/