By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:10:01 +0000

Rocky … right, but …. I get 90 percent too with my 80 dollar scanner and free software. The problem is that 90 percent for the post office in this context is fantastic because ine out of ten of the things you need to do are done by the machine. That is impressive. But when you want a typed up document, 90 percent is a horrible rate of accuracy.What I’m saying is that in one context 90 percent is “good ocr” and in another 90 percent is “not good enough ocr”(I hasten to add that I’m sure the post office is scanning things at a very high rate of speed, which makes that even more impressive)

By: Rocky

Rocky — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:00:58 +0000

I work for the Postal Service (U.S.) and we make use of some pretty sophisticated OCR tech to read the addresses of the letters in the mailstream. And in only a few 100 microseconds (usually). Of course it is only trying to read three to five lines but it actually does a pretty amazing job (about 90%+ is read on the fly). There are problems, of course; certain fonts, grandmother’s handwriting, the goofy way people will put their addresses on a letter, etc. Overall, though, the process simply amazes me. I’ve watched it evolve over twenty years (it’s my job to take care of this stuff on a local basis).The problem for the standard user is simply one of technology. To do what the Postal Service does requires some pretty sophisticated computers and programs, far beyond what the average user could deploy. Good OCR can be done, we just can’t afford it.

Comments on: Optical Character Recognition in Linux

By: Greg Laden

By: Rocky