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I recently tried to do this with Acrobat Pro with varying degrees of success, you might want to give that a shot if you can get access to the program (slightly

by fspacef 10y ago

I recently tried to do this with Acrobat Pro with varying degrees of success, you might want to give that a shot if you can get access to the program (slightly cost prohibitive).

WalterBright 10y ago
I wish I could try various ones, but as you say, cost is an issue. I do have some OCRs, and while they do a credible job with printed text (95%), they fail miserably with typewritten letters (75%) (the blotchiness of a mechanical typewriter throws it off) and fail 100% with handwritten letters, even carefully done block letters. I know there is success with domain specific handwriting recognition, like envelope addresses, but nothing that can handle a cursive letter. You'd think with all the facial recognition progress this should be a much simpler problem. (To do a good OCR, it'd have to examine the context of a muddled character to determine what it should be, just like a human does when reading cursive. This should be an ideal candidate for "deep learning".)
- fspacef 10y ago
  While I think your situation is unique, it would be nice if there was an out-of-the-box ML system that could be trained by individuals for any specific use case (such as transcribing letters). In the future, I think this might be the case where you "teach" a computer or program to recognize and do tasks the same way you would a child or pet. PS- Transcribing letters brings to mind an app on the iPhone that I used to use for instant language translation. Can't quite remember what it was called but Google ended up acquiring them for their OCR technology.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    > While I think your situation is unique It is possible that handwriting recognition is not an attractive target for AI research because few handwrite things anymore. I heard that cursive is not even taught anymore! That leads one to suspect that one can private communication by simply writing in cursive!

by fspacef 10y ago

I recently tried to do this with Acrobat Pro with varying degrees of success, you might want to give that a shot if you can get access to the program (slightly cost prohibitive).

WalterBright 10y ago

I wish I could try various ones, but as you say, cost is an issue. I do have some OCRs, and while they do a credible job with printed text (95%), they fail miserably with typewritten letters (75%) (the blotchiness of a mechanical typewriter throws it off) and fail 100% with handwritten letters, even carefully done block letters. I know there is success with domain specific handwriting recognition, like envelope addresses, but nothing that can handle a cursive letter. You'd think with all the facial recognition progress this should be a much simpler problem. (To do a good OCR, it'd have to examine the context of a muddled character to determine what it should be, just like a human does when reading cursive. This should be an ideal candidate for "deep learning".)

fspacef 10y ago
While I think your situation is unique, it would be nice if there was an out-of-the-box ML system that could be trained by individuals for any specific use case (such as transcribing letters). In the future, I think this might be the case where you "teach" a computer or program to recognize and do tasks the same way you would a child or pet. PS- Transcribing letters brings to mind an app on the iPhone that I used to use for instant language translation. Can't quite remember what it was called but Google ended up acquiring them for their OCR technology.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  > While I think your situation is unique It is possible that handwriting recognition is not an attractive target for AI research because few handwrite things anymore. I heard that cursive is not even taught anymore! That leads one to suspect that one can private communication by simply writing in cursive!