[VB6] MS Office (MODI) OCR - OCR "for free"

This may already have been posted, but a search turned nothing up here in the CodeBank.


If you have an appropriate version of Microsoft Office you can use MODI to do OCR on images. The obvious candidates are 32-bit Office 2003 and 2007, but supposedly this can be made to work in 32-bit Office 2010 as well.

As far as I can tell there is no way to feed images to MODI.Document except by having it load them from disk. But you could always "dump" images to a temporary folder as required, so that isn't a nasty restriction.


Requirements

VB6 development tools. Of course the logic can be trivially ported to Office VBA or even a WSH or MSHTA script written in VBScript.

A version of 32-bit Office supporting MODI.


Notes

This program uses early binding against Microsoft Office Document Imaging 11.0 Type Library (Office 2003). This is used to give us easy access to MODI.Document's OnOCRProgress event and the predefined constant miLANG_ENGLISH in Enum MiLANGUAGES.

To use this code with Office 2007 you'd need to change the reference to Microsoft Office Document Imaging 12.0 Type Library and recompile.

You could also use late binding, but then you would either have to give up using WithEvents (not valid for As Object) and the OnOCRProgress event entirely... or else use additional code or a C++ helper DLL to bind to the event.

MODI was removed in Office 2010, but you might look at:

Install MODI for use with Microsoft Office 2010

Attached Demo

The attachment is large because of included image files.

The program just grabs the file names from a hard-coded folder, then loads and OCRs them one by one and displays the resulting text in a RichTextBox. A status line reports progress on each image as it works.

A Timer control is used to work through the queue of images, primarily to help avoid the program being marked unresponsive by Windows.

The demo helps illustrate the "garbage in, garbage out" nature of OCR: the quality of the results depends on what you feed into it.

You may also find this useful:

Office 2003: Microsoft Office Document Imaging Visual Basic Reference (MODI)

And as it says there:

Quote:

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Microsoft Office Document Imaging 2003 (MODI) adds programmability features to the document scanning and viewing tools that Microsoft Office 2002 (XP) included for the first time. Programmers can take advantage of a simple object model built around the Document and Image (page) objects to display and read a scanned document as easily as a paper document, perform optical character recognition (OCR), search for text within scanned documents, copy and export scanned text and images, combine multiple pages into a single compressed file, and reorganize scanned document pages as easily as rearranging papers in a folder.

In order to install MODI and the support files required for MODI programmability, including the MODI Viewer ActiveX control, select "Microsoft Office Document Imaging" in the "Office Tools" group when installing Microsoft Office 2003. The default installation location is C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MODI\11.0. Installing MODI adds 2 applications, Microsoft Office Document Scanning and Microsoft Office Document Imaging, to the Microsoft Office Tools submenu on the Start menu.

You can program the MODI object model from any development tool that supports the Component Object Model (COM) by setting a reference to the Microsoft Office Document Imaging 11.0 Type Library. You can use the MODI Viewer control from any development tool that supports ActiveX controls by adding Microsoft Office Document Imaging Viewer Control 11.0 to the toolbox.

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Hi

I am using MS Office 2007 . It is giving me message Missing-Microsoft Office Document Imaging 11.0 Type Library.

Thanks

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jagjit

Hi

I am using MS Office 2007 . It is giving me message Missing-Microsoft Office Document Imaging 11.0 Type Library.

Thanks

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The Office team at Microsoft has never cared a whit for standards, conventions, or courtesy. As a result one of the crosses we bear as supplicants on our knees at their altar is the fact that they break binary compatibility on every release.

The real answer is to boycott MS Office and use alternatives at every turn. Since this isn't always practical, our alternative is to either recompile for every Office version using a different reference for each version... or use late binding.

Your choice.

In case it jsn't clear enough for you...

Office 11 is Office 2003, and you don't have Office 2003. Thus you must use an Office 12 library reference to early bind to the Office 2007 MODI library.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dilettante

This may already have been posted, but a search turned nothing up here in the CodeBank.


If you have an appropriate version of Microsoft Office you can use MODI to do OCR on images. The obvious candidates are 32-bit Office 2003 and 2007, but supposedly this can be made to work in 32-bit Office 2010 as well.

As far as I can tell there is no way to feed images to MODI.Document except by having it load them from disk. But you could always "dump" images to a temporary folder as required, so that isn't a nasty restriction.


Requirements

VB6 development tools. Of course the logic can be trivially ported to Office VBA or even a WSH or MSHTA script written in VBScript.

A version of 32-bit Office supporting MODI.


Notes

This program uses early binding against Microsoft Office Document Imaging 11.0 Type Library (Office 2003). This is used to give us easy access to MODI.Document's OnOCRProgress event and the predefined constant miLANG_ENGLISH in Enum MiLANGUAGES.

To use this code with Office 2007 you'd need to change the reference to Microsoft Office Document Imaging 12.0 Type Library and recompile.

You could also use late binding, but then you would either have to give up using WithEvents (not valid for As Object) and the OnOCRProgress event entirely... or else use additional code or a C++ helper DLL to bind to the event.

MODI was removed in Office 2010, but you might look at:

Install MODI for use with Microsoft Office 2010

Attached Demo

The attachment is large because of included image files.

The program just grabs the file names from a hard-coded folder, then loads and OCRs them one by one and displays the resulting text in a RichTextBox. A status line reports progress on each image as it works.

A Timer control is used to work through the queue of images, primarily to help avoid the program being marked unresponsive by Windows.

The demo helps illustrate the "garbage in, garbage out" nature of OCR: the quality of the results depends on what you feed into it.

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Hi,

I found the attached demo helpful !

I would have an other question: it is possible to implement also the Printer "Microsoft Office Document Image Writer" ?

It would be "most, most most" helpful.

Thanks and have a nice day !

Pino

I am using Tesseract OCR engine for our inhouse software OCR needs - mainly from scanned PDF's or PDF files printed as bitmaps. Developed VB6 frontend for that purpose, which extracts raster image from pdf pages and calls tesseract engine.

Tesseract is quite good OCR engine, but fails miserably (as many other OCR engines), when text orientation is vertical, fex. landscape pages scanned in portrait mode. There are several page segmentation settings, but it is quite difficult to automate text orientation detection in raster images.

Windows 10 has inbuilt OCR engine, but not tested this yet.
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingap...or-windows-10/

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Pino1946

I would have an other question: it is possible to implement also the Printer "Microsoft Office Document Image Writer" ?

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I'm not sure what you mean. Do you want to print to a specific printer instead of displaying in the RichTextBox?

That ought to be easy enough. You can print text using Printer.Print and images using the Render method of the IPictureDisp/StdPicture or Printer.PaintPicture.


Oops! Just noticed this is a year old question. Sorry I missed you!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tech99

Windows 10 has inbuilt OCR engine, but not tested this yet.

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That appears to only work for UWP ("Metro") Store Apps, not normal programs. Supposedly with enough gyrations you can use some UWP APIs in a normal desktop program but good luck with that! ;)

Odd thing.

I hadn't installed MODI on this computer since my last clean Windows install. When I went back and ran my demo program in the elevated IDE it popped up a dialog "Installing VB6.exe feature" and appears to have successfully installed it.

Now, it might do this for a compiled EXE too but I would not recommend this unless your first run of the compiled EXE is elevated.

On my side, I use MODI combined with Poppler intensively with a quite good success.

it seems OneNote OCR are more accuracy than MODI

Never tried it.
Have you integrated Onenote OCR in a VB6 app?

of cause, only tried a demo.

Could you post your code here, I'll give try :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Thierry69

Could you post your code here, I'll give try :)

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When you add an image to OneNote it automatically OCR's the images and stores the text as xml with the page. So you reference the app, create a page, insert the image, and then get the text. Code example and binaries here: https://www.journeyofcode.com/free-e...using-onenote/

(this is obviously not recommended for production use)

I took a llok last week, and not usefull in my case.

I wrote a complete OCR part in my soft that recognize invoices & document, according the position of each element in the document.
So based on templates, I can reach arround 85% of recognition, and users can define their templates.
It is combined with NAP2 (to do the scan), and Popller to extract the text. All combined is quite good

But I always try to enhance it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Thierry69

But I always try to enhance it.

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have you tried the google ocr? https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/drag-and-drop

or the Azure one? (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/se...mputer-vision/)

google gives 1000 a month free and ms gives 5000 a month free

Never saw them.

I can't make work the google (tried 3 min)
And the azure is giving interesting result.
It is nearly the same as MODI, except we have the result directyle in JSON.
But it is slower, and needs to upload the picture.
Maybe in complement of MODI to have a better result, I'll do some more tests

HTML Code:

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Attribute VB_Name = "ModOneNoteOcr"
' COM API uses image recognition feature of OneNote 2013/2016
'If the picture is too small, it will lead to recognition. The reason is unknown. It is better to be larger than 60*50
'win10 refer lib
'OneNote 15
'xml 6.0

Private Sub Command2_Click()
'MsgBox VarType(Picture1)
 MsgBox GetTextFromSinglePicture(stdPictureToArraybyPropertyBag(Picture1), ScaleX(Picture1.Image.Width, vbHimetric, vbPixels), ScaleY(Picture1.Image.Height, vbHimetric, vbPixels)) '"C:\Users\xx\Desktop\test.JPG")
End Sub



Public Type imageBase64
    base64Text As String
    imageWidth As Long
    imageHeight As Long
End Type


Private Declare Sub Sleep Lib "kernel32" (ByVal dwMilliseconds As Long)


Private Declare Function CreateStreamOnHGlobal Lib "ole32" (ByVal hGlobal As Long, ByVal fDeleteOnRelease As Long, pPStm As Any) As Long
Private Declare Function GlobalAlloc Lib "kernel32" (ByVal uFlags As Long, ByVal dwBytes As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function GlobalLock Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hMem As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function GlobalUnlock Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hMem As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function GlobalSize Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hMem As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function GetHGlobalFromStream Lib "ole32" (ByVal pPStm As Long, hGlobal As Long) As Long
Private Declare Sub CopyMemory Lib "kernel32.dll" Alias "RtlMoveMemory" (ByRef Destination As Any, ByRef Source As Any, ByVal Length As Long)

Private Declare Function OleLoadPicture Lib "oleaut32.dll" (ByVal lpstream As IUnknown, ByVal lSize As Long, ByVal fRunmode As Long, ByRef riid As Any, ByRef lplpvObj As IPicture) As Long
Private Declare Function SHCreateMemStream Lib "shlwapi.dll" Alias "#12" (ByRef pInit As Byte, ByVal cbInit As Long) As IUnknown

Private Function PictureToByteArray(nPic As IPicture) As Byte()
    Dim IFauxStream As IUnknown ' hack that works with some apis that expect an IStream object
    Dim pData() As Byte
    Dim lSize As Long
    Dim o_hMem As Long, o_lpMem As Long
    Dim o_lngByteCount As Long
   
    Call CreateStreamOnHGlobal(0, 1, IFauxStream)    ' create IStream object
    If nPic.KeepOriginalFormat Then                ' for some reason; cannot use boolean vartype...
        nPic.SaveAsFile ByVal ObjPtr(IFauxStream), False, lSize  ' one for false
    Else
        nPic.SaveAsFile ByVal ObjPtr(IFauxStream), True, lSize  ' one for true
    End If
    If lSize Then
        If Not IFauxStream Is Nothing Then
            If GetHGlobalFromStream(ByVal ObjPtr(IFauxStream), o_hMem) = 0 Then
                o_lngByteCount = GlobalSize(o_hMem)
                If o_lngByteCount > 0 Then
                    o_lpMem = GlobalLock(o_hMem)
                    If o_lpMem <> 0 Then
                        ReDim pData(0 To o_lngByteCount - 1)
                        CopyMemory pData(0), ByVal o_lpMem, o_lngByteCount
                        GlobalUnlock o_hMem
                        PictureToByteArray = pData
                    End If
                End If
            End If
        End If
    End If
End Function

Private Function ByteArrayToPicture(ByRef Data() As Byte) As IPicture
    Dim lSize As Long, IID_IPicture(0 To 1) As Currency, oStream As IUnknown

    lSize = UBound(Data) - LBound(Data) + 1&
    Set oStream = SHCreateMemStream(Data(0&), lSize)

    If Not oStream Is Nothing Then
        IID_IPicture(0&) = 116045007755044.6976@    '{7BF80980-BF32-101A-8BBB-00AA00300CAB}
        IID_IPicture(1&) = -612146501409303.8709@
        lSize = OleLoadPicture(oStream, lSize, 0&, IID_IPicture(0&), ByteArrayToPicture)  ': Debug.Assert lSize = 0& 'S_OK
    End If
End Function

'Identify pictures
'The parameter can be the picture address, stdpicture object, picture array, and the array object needs to manually specify the width and height
Public Function GetTextFromSinglePicture(inPicPathOrArrayPic As Variant, _
                                  Optional mWpix As Long, _
                                  Optional mHpix As Long) As String

    '

    Dim xmlDoc    As New MSXML2.DOMDocument60
    Dim xmlNode  As MSXML2.IXMLDOMNode
    Dim xmlEle    As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement
    Dim inPicPath As String

    If VarType(inPicPathOrArrayPic) = vbString Then
        inPicPath = inPicPathOrArrayPic
    End If
   
    Dim picBase64      As imageBase64

    'Create a temporary notebook
    Dim onenoteFullName As String

    With New Scripting.FileSystemObject
        onenoteFullName = .GetSpecialFolder(TemporaryFolder) & "\" & .GetBaseName(.GetTempName) & ".one"

        '判断函数值是否正常
        If Len(inPicPath) > 0 Then
            If .FileExists(inPicPath) = False Then
                GetTextFromPicture = "! Error File Path !"
                Exit Function
            End If
        End If
    End With

    Dim onenoteApp As New OneNote.Application '  OneNote12.Application

    If onenoteApp Is Nothing Then
        GetTextFromPicture = "! Error in Openning OneNote !"
        GoTo clear_variable_before_exit
    End If
   
    Dim sectionID As String
    Dim pageID    As String

    Select Case VarType(inPicPathOrArrayPic) 'TypeName(inPicPathOrArrayPic)

        Case vbArray Or vbByte  '"Byte()"
            Set xmlEle = CreateNotePageContentElement(2, inPicPathOrArrayPic, mWpix, mHpix)
   
        Case Else
            Set xmlEle = CreateNotePageContentElement(2, inPicPathOrArrayPic)
    End Select
   
    Set xmlEle = AddNodeInfo(xmlEle)
   
    'getsectionID
    onenoteApp.OpenHierarchy onenoteFullName, "", sectionID, cftSection
   
    'getpageID
    onenoteApp.CreateNewPage sectionID, pageID, npsBlankPageNoTitle

    'get XML
    Dim pageXmlText As String
    onenoteApp.GetPageContent pageID, pageXmlText, , xs2013
   
    '
    If xmlDoc.loadXML(pageXmlText) = False Then
        GetTextFromPicture = "! Error in Loading Xml !"
        GoTo clear_variable_before_exit
    End If

    With xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("one:Page").Item(0)
        .appendChild xmlEle
    End With
   
    '
    onenoteApp.UpdatePageContent xmlDoc.documentElement.xml, , xs2013

    '，
    Sleep 1000

    Dim iCNT As Integer
    iCNT = 10
re_getPageContent:
    onenoteApp.GetPageContent pageID, pageXmlText, , xs2013
    xmlDoc.loadXML pageXmlText
    Set xmlEle = xmlDoc.documentElement.getElementsByTagName("one:OCRText").Item(0)

    If xmlEle Is Nothing Then
        If iCNT > 0 Then
            Sleep 1000
            iCNT = iCNT - 1
            GoTo re_getPageContent
        Else
            GetTextFromSinglePicture = "! Waiting OneNote Time Expired !"
        End If
    Else
        GetTextFromSinglePicture = xmlEle.Text
    End If
       
clear_variable_before_exit:

    If Not onenoteApp Is Nothing Then
        If Len(pageID) > 0 Then
            onenoteApp.DeleteHierarchy pageID, , True
        End If
        Set onenoteApp = Nothing
    End If
    Kill onenoteFullName
End Function

'When paraContent is an image array, you need to manually add the image size, W is width, H is height. Pixel unit
Private Function CreateNotePageContentElement(contentType As Integer, _
                                              paraContent As Variant, _
                                              Optional mWpix As Long, _
                                              Optional mHpix As Long) As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement
    Dim xmlEle  As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement
    Dim xmlNode As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement
               
    Dim ns      As String
    ns = "one:"
   
    With New MSXML2.DOMDocument60

        Select Case contentType

            Case 1 '文本
                Set xmlNode = .createElement(ns & "T")
                xmlNode.Text = paraContent

            Case 2 '图片
                Dim picBase64 As imageBase64

                Select Case VarType(paraContent)

                    Case vbArray Or vbByte  '"Byte()"
                        picBase64 = getBase64(paraContent, mWpix, mHpix)

                    Case Else
                        picBase64 = getBase64(paraContent)
                End Select
               
                '创建一个图片XML信息
               
                Set xmlNode = .createElement(ns & "Image")
                xmlNode.setAttribute "format", "jpg"
                xmlNode.setAttribute "originalPageNumber", 0
               
                Set xmlEle = .createElement(ns & "Position")
                xmlEle.setAttribute "x", 0
                xmlEle.setAttribute "y", 0
                xmlEle.setAttribute "z", 0
                xmlNode.appendChild xmlEle
               
                Set xmlEle = .createElement(ns & "Size")
                xmlEle.setAttribute "width", picBase64.imageWidth
                xmlEle.setAttribute "height", picBase64.imageHeight
                xmlNode.appendChild xmlEle
               
                Set xmlEle = .createElement(ns & "Data")
                xmlEle.Text = picBase64.base64Text
                xmlNode.appendChild xmlEle
        End Select
    End With
    Set CreateNotePageContentElement = xmlNode
End Function

'XML处理的函数
Private Function AddNodeInfo(ContentElement As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement) As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement
    Dim xmlEle As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement
    Dim xmlNode As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement
    Dim ns As String
    ns = "one:"
    Set xmlNode = ContentElement
    With New MSXML2.DOMDocument60
        Set xmlEle = .createElement(ns & "OE")
        xmlEle.appendChild xmlNode
        Set xmlNode = xmlEle
       
        Set xmlEle = .createElement(ns & "OEChildren")
        xmlEle.appendChild xmlNode
        Set xmlNode = xmlEle
       
        Set xmlEle = .createElement(ns & "Outline")
        xmlEle.appendChild xmlNode
        Set xmlNode = xmlEle
    End With

    Set AddNodeInfo = xmlNode

End Function

'图片处理为Base64编码的函数

Public Function getBase64(inBmpFile As Variant, _
                          Optional mWpix As Long, _
                          Optional mHpix As Long) As imageBase64
   
    Dim xmlEle As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement

    With New MSXML2.DOMDocument60
        Set xmlEle = .createElement("Base64Data")
    End With
    xmlEle.dataType = "bin.base64"

    Select Case VarType(inBmpFile) 'typename(inBmpFile)

        Case vbString '"String"
            Debug.Print "图片路径"

            With CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")
                .Type = adTypeBinary
                .Open
                .LoadFromFile inBmpFile
                xmlEle.nodeTypedValue = .Read()
                .Close
            End With

            With CreateObject("WIA.ImageFile")
                .loadfile inBmpFile
                getBase64.imageHeight = .Height
                getBase64.imageWidth = .Width
            End With

'        Case vbLong '"Picture"
'            Debug.Print "图片对象 stdpicture对象句柄"
'            xmlEle.nodeTypedValue =
'            getBase64.imageHeight = Form1.ScaleY(inBmpFile.Height, vbHimetric, vbPixels)
'            getBase64.imageWidth = Form1.ScaleX(inBmpFile.Width, vbHimetric, vbPixels)

        Case vbArray Or vbByte '"Byte()"
            xmlEle.nodeTypedValue = inBmpFile
            Debug.Print "图片数组"
            getBase64.imageHeight = mHpix
            getBase64.imageWidth = mWpix
    End Select
   
    getBase64.base64Text = xmlEle.Text

End Function

Public Function stdPictureToArraybyPropertyBag(nPic As PictureBox) As Byte()
    Dim pb As New PropertyBag
    pb.WriteProperty "test", nPic.Picture
    ' Dim b() As Byte
    'Dim a() As Byte
    ' SavePicture Picture1.Image, App.Path & "\test.jpg"
    ' a = PictureToByteArray(Picture1.Image)
    ' MsgBox TypeName(a)
    stdPictureToArraybyPropertyBag = MidB(pb.Contents, 49, LenB(pb.Contents) - 50) 'propertybag比正常读取的多50字节
    'TestBase64 b
   
End Function

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Leveraging Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) OCR within VB6 offers a cost-effective solution for optical character recognition. Harnessing the power of MODI allows developers to integrate OCR functionality seamlessly into their applications, enhancing productivity without the need for additional third-party OCR libraries. It's an invaluable resource for efficient data extraction. GB Whatsapp Apk

Isn't this a B O T ?

-> Bit Bucket

Quote:

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Originally Posted by alora40

Leveraging Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) OCR within VB6.

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