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Optical Character Recognition Still Struggling With Handwriting
Ian Lamont recently asked Google if they planned to extend their transcription of books and other printed media to include public records, many of which were handwritten before word processors became ubiquitous. Google wouldn't talk about any potential plans, but Lamont found out a bit more about the limits of optical character recognition in the process:
"Even though some CAPTCHA schemes have been cracked in the past year, a far more difficult challenge lies in using software to recognize handwritten text. Optical character recognition has been used for years to convert printed documents into text data, but the enormous variation in handwriting styles has thwarted large-scale OCR imports of handwritten public documents and historical records. Ancestry.com took a surprising approach to digitizing and converting all publicly released US census records from 1790 to 1930: It contracted the job to Chinese firms whose staff manually transcribed the names and other information. The Chinese staff are specially trained to read the cursive and other handwriting styles from digitized paper records and microfilm. The task is ongoing with other handwritten records, at a cost of approximately $10 million per year, the company's CEO says."
Joking or not, that's kind of the idea behind reCAPTCHA. It takes words that OCR failed on and uses them as CAPTCHAs. The same idea could work for handwriting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA
There is an on-line archive of all people that have passed trough Ellis Island (http://www.ellisisland.org/search/passSearch.asp). It consists of retyped (OCR-ed?) ship manifests. Manifests are lists of passengers, with names, places of births and similar information. In original, they are written by hand, in cursive scripts (as expected for late 19th and early 20th century).
Problem is not with the script, but with appropriate context. Someone who retyped this, did not know what to expect in these forms.
My grand-grand father's place of origin was written as "Lipovqani, Slovenia". Pair "lj" was recognized as "q". For someone who is native English speaker "lj" one next to other does not make too much sense. But for anyone with Slavic origin, "q" does not make sense (it's only in foreign words), and "lj" does make sense since it is a way to write "soft l" voice like in "Richelieu".
Ok, maybe that was not the an easy part to guess. But "Slovenia" was serious error. In that moment, Slovenia did not exist. It was part of the Austro-Hungary, and it did not exist as single entity inside it. What was really written was actually "Slavonia". That's an area in Eastern Croatia, and it *was* an entity inside Austro-Hungary.
Should I mention that I was not able to track my grand-grand mother and my other grand-grand father?
No sig today.
Can OCR properly trace the lines at least to replicate it? Meaning, it could make a vector replica of the handwriting? Would be neat if it could do that, then try to straighten out the lines, perhaps to simulate the possible path the original writer took to write it. Of course, the software will have to figure out intersections. Maybe a path of logic would be to know what turns a handwriter would NOT take, and then determine individual letters from that.
Combine that with other logic, like finding "dots" would indicate an i or a j, and maybe it will improve.
You joke, but there really in very little reason to teach children handwriting/script/cursive (whichever you want to call it). The point of cursive was to speed up writing. It was never any good for readability. In today's world, if you need to write a lot of stuff, you are generally going to type it on a computer. Since just about anything that we would want to write by hand will be short, the speed gain would be minimal. Thus spending time and resource to teach every kid to write a useless, illegibly font is pretty pointless.
Except for most of us it's faster to write with your hands.
Writing by hand, you can jump letters and make abbrevs, you can draw diagrams right in there, and not to mention it feels a lot better. I don't know why but sitting and typing on my computer, and same when I used to paint minis, feels painful and stuffy. With the option of either typing or writing I'd definately take writing. Sure, with typing on a computer you can erase stuff quickly, but text editors have always been shitty for me (stuff like AbiWord often having graphical glitches or plain slow, text editors too or just lame feeling) and hitting a bunch of blocks to make words does not feel as good as actually writing down the words.
I never mastered cursive properly. I write "script", but write while skipping letters in my notes and using small symbols (batman symbol, drawn as a W in a circle, for example, is distress; three points is "donc", ds dans, etc and it changes depending on context). I write fairly fast, and imho much faster than when I type, if only because when I type I often hit the wrong keys; often being once a paragraph, and it's often because I can't get my mind straight on the keymap, or my fingers hit in the wrong order.