Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 635.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sat, 04 May 2002 08:59:50 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: OCR for handwriting?
Dear colleagues:
See the following query about OCR for handwritten documents.
A brief look around the Web turns up, for example, a report from the Center
for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and
Technology, "OCR: handwriting",
<http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/HLTsurvey/ch2node6.html>, which makes one hopeful.
It would appear that it's time to revisit the question and collect
experiences with existing products, if any. As we all know, upbeat
technical papers are better than pessimistic ones, but for the likes of us
product names and URLs, backed by solid recommendations, are to be
preferred. Are there any of the latter to be found?
In the following note particularly what kind of handwriting is to be
processed. It seems the fellow didn't have OCR in mind at the time, though
he did indeed have an interesting (and shall we say expanded?) mind.
Please circulate this note wherever you think it might get a learned response.
Yours,
WM
>Date: Fri, 03 May 2002 15:26:42 -0700
>From: James Sexton <sexton@camosun.bc.ca>
>>To: willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
>Reply-to: James Sexton <sexton@camosun.bc.ca>
>X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200
>X-MailScanner: Found to be clean
>
>Dear Prof McCarty:
>I am a scholarly editor--most recently, co-ed. "Complete Essays of Aldous
>Huxley", and, at the moment, I am strongly considering committing myself to
>producing an authorised edition of ca 1,000 unpublished letters by Huxley.
>However, I have no funding set up, and since many of the letters are
>handwritten, I was wondering if you have any more recent information about
>OCR software that recognizes handwriting?
>Obviously the demands on my time and budget will be much greater than I
>would hope for if there is no reasonably accurate OCR scanning software now
>available. I did read your 1989 message on OptiRam--not sure if they are
>still in business. Any information you can provide would be much
>appreciated.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>James Sexton, Ph.D.
Dr Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer,
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London,
Strand, London WC2R 2LS, U.K.,
+44 (0)20 7848-2784, ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/,
willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk, w.mccarty@btinternet.com
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