From: "/**\\anonymous/**\\" <panther@iglou.com>
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 1997 09:34:57 -0800 (PST)
To: Alan Olsen <alan@ctrl-alt-del.com>
Subject: Re: OCR and Machine Readable Text
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970102225436.01072284@mail.teleport.com>
Message-ID: <32CD435E.24DC@iglou.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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

> ---
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