I recently came across CRAFT wich appears to have come out of the ICDAR2017 Robust reading challenge.
It performed better than expected. I only tested a few images so please don't take my word for it.
That led me to PaddleOCR. There is still plenty of room for improvement but I found it way more convenient to use for my purposes than messing with Tesseract.
Thanks for the suggestions - I've tried Paddle before, however was looking for a local only version - seems like Paddle uses external sources (cn) for some of its OCR features, and unfortunately that won't work in this line of work
It performed better than expected. I only tested a few images so please don't take my word for it.
That led me to PaddleOCR. There is still plenty of room for improvement but I found it way more convenient to use for my purposes than messing with Tesseract.
https://github.com/clovaai/CRAFT-pytorch
https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR