From: Steve Stewart <steve@resudox.net>
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 1997 18:21:34 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: OCR and Machine Readable Text
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970102225436.01072284@mail.teleport.com>
Message-ID: <32CDBDD9.2A27@resudox.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


 I have used OCR a fair bit, and I agree with you,  I think
you're being generous by saying  even a 65% accuracy rate. I think
our OCR technology today is pathetic, and it would be quicker just to type
the damn documents ourselves. I've used a bunch of different packages from
guys like HP, and others. I certainly don't know what Alan Olsen was using.
Then again, it obviously depends on the quality of the documents you are
scanning. So If you had perfect crisply printed, beautiful documents, then
maybe you'd get a good accuracy rate. But nice documents, are usually ones
generated recently, therefore probably already on the computer, and so
they don't even need to scanned. You see what I'm getting at, all the documents
we don't have on the computer are, usually, older ones and therefore of
lesser quality, so that's why our OCR fails almost more often than not.
I guess I'm being a little harsh, I mean this type of technology is quite
revolutionary and actually quite amazing, but it's far, far from perfect.

 

Just my 2 cents...

 

    Steve