🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello everyone,

	There are many commercial OCR engines on the market right now for
reading printed text. I am aware of products like the Kurzweil K-5000 and
Discover 7320 Model 5 (from Xerox), OmniPage (from Caere Corp.), SAIC (from
Differential Processing System) and NestorReader.

	I wonder if anybody has done independent evaluation of any OCR
products, since such information would be useful to potential users. 
Specifically, I need answers to the following questions:


(i) name of product and company which produces it  

(ii) fonts and point sizes handled by product

(iii) whether the OCR engine exhibits true multifont and "multisize"
      capability i.e. is able to recognize text without the user
      having to specify in advance its font type and point size.

      If so, what is the accuracy over a variety of fonts and point sizes?

      If not, what is the accuracy over common fonts like Courier, Times
      Roman and Helvetica and point sizes from 8 to 24 points? 

(iv) What are the commercial OCR products, if any, that can
     1. recognise a page of text containing a mixture of fonts and point
	sizes at greater than 98% accuracy?

     2. recognise a page of text containing a single known font and a
	range of point sizes at greater than 99% accuracy?

(v) Are there any commercial OCR systems that accept noisy input or 
    text on shaded background eg. carbon and photostated/fax copies and
    still maintain an acceptable accuracy (say greater than 95%)?
  

Further, if there are any evaluations of commercial handwritten OCR systems, 
I will also be interested to hear about them.

Please email all replies/references to kaykit@iti.gov.sg. If there are 
enough responses, I will summarise.

Thanks!




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Kay-Kit CHAN    			| Internet: kaykit@iti.gov.sg
Knowledge Systems Lab			| Bitnet:   kaykit@itivax
Information Technology Institute	| Tel:      (65) 772-0920
National Computer Board of Singapore    | Fax:      (65) 770-3043