OCR lib for math formulas

Question

I need an open OCR library which is able to scan complex printed math formulas (for example some formulas which were generated via LaTeX). I want to get some LaTeX-like output (or just some AST-like data).

Is there something like this already? Or are current OCR technics just able to parse line-oriented text?

(Note that I also posted this question on Metaoptimize because some people there might have additional knowledge.)

The problem was also described by OpenAI as im2latex.

Answer 1

SESHAT is a open source system written in C++ for recognizing handwritten mathematical expressions. SESHAT was developed as part of a PhD thesis at the PRHLT research center at Universitat Politècnica de València.

An online demo:http://cat.prhlt.upv.es/mer/

The source: https://github.com/falvaro/seshat

Seshat is an open-source system for recognizing handwritten mathematical expressions. Given a sample represented as a sequence of strokes, the parser is able to convert it to LaTeX or other formats like InkML or MathML.

Answer 2

According to the answers on Metaoptimize and the discussion on the Tesseract mailinglist, there doesn't seem to be an open/free solution yet which can do that.

The only solution which seems to be able to do it (but I cannot verify as it is Windows-only and non-free) is, like a few other people have mentioned, the InftyProject.