Google announced yesterday that they are sponsoring OCROpus an open-source OCR and handwriting recognition research project. More information about the effort can be found here. From the OCROpus website:
“OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities.
The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90’s and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods.
OCRopus is development is sponsored by Google and is initially intended for high-throughput, high-volume document conversion efforts. We expect that it will also be an excellent OCR system for many other applications.”
Hmmm. Server side document and handwriting recognition anyone?
[Found via Slashdot]