3 ms·

Maybe… some of these algorithms from the 1980s struggled to do basic OCR, so they may need a lot of modification to be useful.

• PaulHoule 1y ago
  That whole approach of "find edges, convert to line drawing, process a line drawing" in the 1980s struggled to do anything at all.
  • Retric 1y ago
    There was a surprising amount of useful OCR happening in the 70’s. High error rates and significant manual rescanning can be acceptable in some applications, as long as there’s no better alternative.
    • GuB-42 1y ago
      I find that modern OCR, audio transcription, etc... are beginning to have the opposite problem: they are too smart. It means that they make a lot fewer mistakes, but when they do, it can be subtle. For example, if the text is "the bat escaped by the window", a dumb OCR can write "dat" instead of "bat". When you read the resulting text, you notice it and using outside clues, recover the original word. An smart OCR will notice that "dat" isn't a word and can change it for "cat", and indeed "the cat escaped by the window" is a perfectly good sentence, unfortunately, it is wrong and confusing.
      • devilbunny 1y ago
        Thankfully, most speech misrecognition events are still obvious. I have seen this in OCR and, as you say, it is bad. There are enough mistakes in the sources; let us not compound them.
• taeric 1y ago
  I'm not sure I can sign on to this. In particular, this sounds kind of like an indictment of many algorithms. But, how many where there? And did any go on to give good results? Considers, OCR was a very new field, such that a lot of the struggle was getting data into a place you could even try recognition against it. It should be no surprise that they were not able to succeed that often. It would be more surprising if they had a lot of different algorithms.