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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."
Beat up Martin = Eat up Martha
Now that's a name that'll be remembered
It seems to me that it would be better to OCR everything and contract the proof-reading to the Chinese firm. The wide variation of writing styles and letter forms may make 100% accuracy of OCR impossible for this task, but starting from OCR should reduce the task, shouldn't it?
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
I can't even read people's handwriting, I hardly expect a computer to.
1. Use the handwritten words as CAPTCHAs ...
2. Wait for the bad guys to come up with programs to break them.
3.
4. Profit!
There is a simple reason that general OCR is much harder than cracking a CAPTCHA. General OCR has to recognize text *reliably*. CAPTCHA breakers are thrilled with a 10% success rate, because they use distributed systems created by worms to do the hard work a million times over. If you got 10% of the words right when scanning historical records you might as well not bother.
An OCR program can include a bank of fonts, and even when there is some sort of spill/ink blot/whatever on the paper, it has a solid reference. Handwriting isn't so easy, because humans don't always write their "Q"s with the line in the exact same spot and other fluctuations. Even if you gave a computer a point of reference (neatly drawn letters corresponding with their actual alphabetical values), a computer probably couldn't get it for a lot of people with inconsistent handwriting.
Now, with context and improved technology, I don't think that handwriting recognition is impossible. I have a feeling that it will be a technology like speech recognition: never perfect, and it will require training.
Now you take the human translated recognition, and use it to train your genetic algo or neural net against the original images.
meh
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.
Get the guys writing the code that breaks captcha.
Simple, honestly. Make it economically worthwhile to write the code to do such. Writing code to break handwriting isn't as lucrative as say, writing virii or malware code.
Take a look at the results...
disclaimer: I doubt they will EVER break my doc's handwriting.
--Toll_Free
For a moment there, I was picturing some new technology that could distinguish between C, PERL and and Java written on scratch paper.
In pseudocode:
// undecipherable
IF LooksLikeC THEN "This must be C code"
IF LooksLikeJava THEN "This must be Java code"
ELSE "Must be Perl code"
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.
Speed-writing, of one form or another, is still useful for note-taking (in meetings, lectures/seminars, classes, etc). You can't have your laptop everywhere.
(and in some circumstances the keyboard clicking is loud enough to be considered disruptive - true, there are loud pens & pencils, but I run into far more loud laptops than scratching handwriting implements).
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.
Have you ever taken lecture notes?
The US Post Office has, for years, had fairly reliable automated reading of handwritten digits, which is used to auto-sort and -route mail by zipcode. It can handle some pretty terrible handwriting, crazy arrangement on the envelope, and unlikely variations, so only a relatively small percentage of letters are spit out to be read by human eyes.
Its task is made easier by the fact that they're locating and segmenting fixed-length sequences that are usually at least somewhat separated: they're looking for either a 5-digit zip code or a 5-dash-4-digit zip+4, and handwritten digits usually don't connect in the way that cursive letters do. That and you have only 10 digits to deal with, instead of 36 alphanumeric characters plus punctuation, but that particular difference is just a matter of computing power and memory to scale up to ~4x the charset.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
i've outsourced all of my computer applications and software needs to India.
instead of using PowerPoint at meetings, i just have two Indian women in bikinis hold up large displays with my bullet points written on them--they even do slide transitions.
instead of an e-mail client, i use an Indian courier. it takes a while for me to communicate with international clients, but i receive practically no spam.
and rather than a word processor i have a guy with a notepad that a dictate to. he also offers me helpful tips when he notices that i'm trying to write a letter.
then there's the 17-year-old i have doing my taxes. i don't even think he's out of high school yet, but he beats Turbo Tax any day.
but you should really see the guy i have simulating Windows Vista for me. he wears this really slick suit, moves really slow, and everyone once in a while he comes up to me and kicks me in the balls.