OCR Technology

We are talking Document Management System here and as a part of DMS, we talked about OCR in our last post. Today we are going to talk more about OCR Technology.

Current Status of OCR Technology:

The accurate recognition of Latin-script, typewritten text is now considered largely a solved problem. Typical accuracy rates exceed 99%, although certain applications demanding even higher accuracy require human review for errors. Handwriting recognition, including recognition of hand printing, cursive handwriting, is still the subject of active research, as is recognition of printed text in other scripts (especially those with a very large number of characters)

Systems for recognizing hand-printed text on the fly have enjoyed commercial success in recent years. Among these are the input device for personal digital assistants such as those running Palm OS. The Apple Newton pioneered this technology. The algorithms used in these devices take advantage of the fact that the order, speed, and direction of individual lines segments at input are known. Also, the user can be retrained to use only specific letter shapes. These methods cannot be used in software that scans paper documents, so accurate recognition of hand-printed documents is still largely an open problem. Accuracy rates of 80% to 90% on neat, clean hand-printed characters can be achieved, but that accuracy rate still translates to dozens of errors per page, making the technology useful only in very limited applications. This variety of OCR is now commonly known in the industry as ICR, or Intelligent Character Recognition.

we continue our talk on OCR Technology in next post.

ref: Document Management Software, wikipedia