Both companies offer free trial versions so you can test them before you splash out. It’s generally agreed that the best OCR programs are Abbyy FineReader (£99) and Nuance’s Omni (£79.99) and Ultimate (£169.99), though neither is suitable for cursive handwriting recognition. However, all this has more to do with keyboard replacement strategies than with OCR. I’ve had some success with this approach, starting more than a decade ago with Microsoft OneNote (which can also record your voice in sync) running on Windows XP Tablet Edition, and more recently with a Livescribe Echo digital pen and MyScript software. That enables you to train the software to recognise your input, while the software also trains you to write characters in ways that it can understand. In my experience, you can only get handwriting recognition to work well enough by doing it in real time. OCR works best with high-quality printed materials and worst of all with handwriting, so you’re not starting from the best position. The same software wouldn’t have the domain expertise to cope with a Russian-speaking coroner who liked to include Sanskrit quotations in his handwritten autopsies. For example, it’s possible to recognise the English names for numbers and the names of major UK cities, especially if you can get people to write each letter in its own little box. But in practice, it works best when dealing with restricted inputs and/or limited domains.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |