Slashdot Mirror
Accurate OCR?
theBrownfury asks: "I work at a lab on a university campus that provides services for disabled students. One of the main functions of this lab is to convert printed materials such as books, reading packets, etc. into electronic text(RTF or Word) that is either going to be fed to a text-to-speech synthesizer or going to be further processed for use in braille devices. Ideally we'd like to be able to process 1000 pages a week. However our current solution (a Bell&Howell 4040D scanner coupled to a mid-level PC workstation with OmniPage Pro 11 and 2-3 proofing stations) is limited to an average of 10-11 (16 on a good day) pages per hour because of the constant hand holding the OCR process requires. We've already made sure we're feeding the OCR engine good quality scans. Also it should be clarified that the variety of materials we deal with is so varied that a majority of it cannot be defined by any types of 'general' scanning or OCR templates."
"Do any of you know of a solution which can exploit our current scanner, which we're rather happy with, but bring in a better OCR method to improve our efficiency? It should be noted that the solution should be financially reasonable (as ni less than US$10K).
Our biggest bottlenecks:
- software's terrific inability to accurately pick up the areas of text on the scanned page to OCR
- marking words as possibly erroneous without checking against dictionary elongating the proofing process
- stability of OCR software
Bonuses:
- dealing with multiple languages such as Spanish and French
- capability to OCR matematical texts and papers. Currently we hand type math textbooks for students."
Perhaps some research into the US Postal Service OCR developers would be useful. Their systems are obviously huge, well funded, and exceptionally accurate considering the volume of mail. I don't know how they maintain it, if its an internal group, or a contract with external developers, but whoever has it, has got a good thing.
For longer texts, it might be worth it to call the publisher and ask if they have an electronic version available. Why reinvent the wheel if you don't have to?
Another solution might be stretching your budget by doing your proof-reading offshore.
Why not ask Google how they do it?
They've got a number of image-based paper catalogs online and searchable, and thus OCR'd.
Talk about varied formatting. It seems to be reasonably accurate, and I'm sure that the pocess is pretty streamlined -- everything else they do seems to be...
Here is an example.
Kid-proof tablet..
you will do yourself and your lab a big favor if you choose RTF. RTF is documented, so you do not lock yourself with a single vendor (microsoft) for further processing of the electronic data. It may not matter now, but it could be very important for you guys at some point in future ...