From: Jim Byrd <byrd@ACM.ORG>
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 1997 10:58:51 -0800 (PST)
To: alan@ctrl-alt-del.com>
Subject: Re: OCR and Machine Readable Text
Message-ID: <3.0.32.19970103135011.006af448@super.zippo.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


I used to work for an OCR company (Kurzweil, a division of Xerox; now Xerox
Advanced Imaging).  The OCR software they had did better than 95% over 10
years ago.

And yes, you could run on a 286.  The trick was to use a board plugged into
the 286 which itself had enough horsepower (a Motorola cpu) to do the job.
I actually started a project to develop a Windows (version 1.3!) driver for
this, but at the time Xerox had no interest in Windows.  So the project was
cancelled and the Windows people essentially dismissed.  Xerox now has a
Windows product called TextBridge.

At 12:35 PM 1/3/97 -0500, /**\\anonymous/**\\" <panther@iglou.com> wrote:
>Alan Olsen wrote:
>> I used to work for a company that would transfer entire archives of medical
>> journals.  Much of it we would just OCR.  Some of it we would send off
>> shore.  The OCR software was about 95% reliable and this was over 5 years
>> ago.  (And we were using 286 boxes for much of the OCR work.  Not a heavy
>> technoligical investment.)  I am sure that things have improved a great
>> deal since then.  (My new scanner included OCR software.  I will have to
>> run a test and report the findings.
>
>	I'd like to know what OCR software you were using.  All tests we
>completed at my place of employment were very poor quality wise.  We
>showed
>a %65 accuracy rate.  Not very good when you need to transfer a five
>year
>backlog of medical and technical journals.  This was using a high
>resolution
>scanner with a package that was bundled along with it.  About a year
>ago,
>my employer considered transfering data taken off of forms into a
>relational
>database using an OCR program.  Again, we found the findings to be too
>innacurate for our needs.  I may have just been using the wrong programs
>for
>the job, but the findings were depressing...
>
>panther
>
>> ---
>> |   If you're not part of the solution, You're part of the precipitate.  |
>> |"The moral PGP Diffie taught Zimmermann unites all| Disclaimer:         |
>> | mankind free in one-key-steganography-privacy!"  | Ignore the man      |
>> |`finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key  | behind the keyboard.|
>> |         http://www.ctrl-alt-del.com/~alan/       |alan@ctrl-alt-del.com|
>
>