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Search Engines for Handwritten Documents

Posted by michael on from the lost-art dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Massachusetts have created a tool for automatically searching handwritten historical documents, such as the 140,000 pages that make up George Washington's personal papers in the Library of Congress. The most interesting part is that the papers are scanned versions of the originals and the search tool actually recognizes the handwritten text from these images."

5 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Who still reads those? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    In America, handwriting is only for old people.

    1. Re:Who still reads those? by Sheepdot · · Score: 4, Funny

      I write out my checks in cursive. The other day I was admiring how pretty my cursive looked and how well it had developed from when I was in second grade and told to "TRY HARDER WEAKLING OR YOU WILL NEVER GET A JOB!". Then I realized just how ghey it was that I was enjoying the sight of it and hurridly gave it to the cashier... who was a guy... who (ick) winked at me.

  2. Good Work! by CaptainCarrot · · Score: 4, Funny

    How pleafant that they've done what waf neceffary to make this happen. How did they train the foftware to recognize the quirky 18th Century handwriting?

    --
    And the brethren went away edified.
    1. Re:Good Work! by That's+Unpossible! · · Score: 4, Funny

      How pleafant that they've done what waf neceffary to make this happen.

      Personally, I think it fucks.

      --
      Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
  3. It's not OCR by Anonymous+Cowdog · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's "Pixelative Text Cognizance."

    It's different. With OCR these rays of light scan the original, translate each scanpoint to discrete RGB values, and do pattern recognition.

    With this system, they just read the discrete RGB values directly from pixels of documents scanned in with rays of light, then they do recognition of patterns. See, it's totally different.