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."

Comments

text-to-speech math stuff?

[GuyMannDude]

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.

- capability to OCR matematical texts and papers. Currently we hand type math textbooks for students."

I pity the kids who are going to have to listen to "fluid dynamics on tape":

"Partial rho partial t plus rho times left parenthesis partial u partial x plus partial v partial y plus partial w partial z right parenthesis equals zero".

GMD

Here's a few suggestions

[dbrutus]

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.

Re:US Postal Service

[duffbeer703]

The USPS has a very tightly defined set of data that it needs to scan. (ie zipcodes)

If there is more than a slight chance of a misread, then the machines automatically send the envelope to a human reader, who keys in the zip.

Achieve 100% Accurecy

[zulux]

Most OCR systems can only give you 98% accurcy, but we've foung that by running the output through cmdr_taco's spelling and gramer checker, that the accurcy is bumped up to 100%.

Just like this post!

Abby FineReader...

[greenhide]

In regards to accuracy: I've tested and compared OmniPage Pro to Abby FineReader and Abby is much, much better at text recognition. It doesn't offer as many export formats as OmniPage Pro does, but it does include an SDK, so if you can get your hands on some programmers you might be able to fiddle with it some. Abby is definitely a step up from OmniPage.

dealing with multiple languages such as Spanish and French

I'm pretty sure that Abby FineReader has language modules, so you can scan works in many languages.