# kha-white/manga-ocr

Optical character recognition for Japanese text, with the main focus being Japanese manga

Repository: https://github.com/kha-white/manga-ocr
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/manga-ocr
Language: Python
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: ocr, japanese, manga, transformers, computer-vision, deep-learning, comics
Last push: 2026-07-19T08:43:43+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 90/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 93, release rhythm 81, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 1691, "days_push": 45, "days_rel": 45, "gap_med": 82, "n_releases_24m": 4}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 2758, forks 140 (observed 2026-08-28T04:07:18.359653+00:00)

## What it is
Manga OCR is a Python library providing optical character recognition for Japanese text, focused on Japanese manga. It uses a custom end-to-end Vision Encoder Decoder model built with Hugging Face Transformers, robust to vertical/horizontal text, furigana, overlaid text, varied fonts, and low-quality images.

## Use cases
- extract japanese text from manga panels
- ocr japanese text from images
- recognize text in manga speech bubbles
- read vertical japanese text from scans
- build a japanese reading and mining workflow
- process furigana-laden text in comics
- use as a general purpose printed japanese ocr

## When to choose
- you need high-quality OCR for Japanese manga or printed Japanese text
- you need multi-line text recognition in a single pass
- your images are low quality, have furigana, or text overlaid on art
- you want a simple Python API or CLI to integrate into a reading workflow

## When to avoid
- you need handwriting recognition rather than printed text
- you need OCR for languages other than Japanese
- you need scene text detection/localization rather than recognition of a given region
- you cannot run a PyTorch/Transformers model locally

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: stable
- function: ocr, image-processing, machine-learning, deep-learning, nlp
- domain: computer-vision, image-processing, machine-learning
- platform: python, cross-platform
- tags: japanese, manga, transformers, vision-encoder-decoder, furigana, pytorch, natural-language-processing

## Member repositories
- kha-white/manga-ocr (main) score 90

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:18.359653+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T08:18:47.917358+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/kha-white/manga-ocr (fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:18.359653+00:00, sha 05451f3162be)
  - registry_pypi: https://pypi.org/pypi/manga-ocr/json (fetched 2026-08-29T09:56:40.048038+00:00, sha 1ab308266349)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.