OCR for ancient Greek

Tools and advice for the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of Ancient Greek

• Ancient Greek OCR provides downloads and instructions for OCR using the Tesseract engine. Works on Windows, Linux, OSX & Android.
• Antigrapheus allows you to use the Ancient Greek OCR training file above to OCR documents in a web browser, using Tesseract.js.
• Bruce Robertson has created "Rigaudon", "a complete suite of scripts, python code and data required for producing polytonic Greek OCR"
  • Rigaudon GitHub page
  • Lace: Greek OCR collects results of OCR processing with Rigaudon on public domain texts
  • Initial reports on preliminary results of a survey of techniques: http://www.heml.org/RobertsonGreekOCR/
• A number of people have produced training files for specific Greek fonts in the Kraken OCR engine:
  • Greek Cursive, from an edition of John Chrysostom's works by Henry Savile
  • Greek from an edition of Theodorus Gaza's Attic paraphrase of the Iliad
  • Greek models in the Kraken models repo (these are in the legacy pyrnn model format and may not work with the latest version of Kraken, see this issue)
• The Gamera toolkit for analysing and scanning complex texts includes some experiments with polytonic Greek
• Federico Boschetti did some earlier experimentation with adapting/training Google's OCR engine tesseract to ancient Greek texts: http://www.himeros.eu/ (related paper)
• ABBYY FineReader can be made to work with ancient Greek with extensive training
• Google Docs now allows you to have it do OCR on uploaded documents in a variety of languages, and you can get some results by specifying "Greek" and uploading a PDF (images seem not to work). Quality is about on the level of Google Books OCR of printed ancient Greek.

Alternatives

• AccessTEI is a service for members of the TEI for manual keying of texts which can handle ancient Greek