OpenOCR Freeware Utility from Cognitive Technologies

In our modern world, simple retyping documents into a computer is absolutely inefficient process, as it takes your valuable time, you can spend for more important tasks. Besides, when the paper document includes images and other elements of decoration, you will not be able to copy them easily into the computer file without scanning. OpenOCR (CuneiForm) is offering you an advanced and automatic way to convert a paper copy of the original document, including images, tables, columns, paragraphs, indentions, font styles and sizes, into identical soft copy.


OpenOCR has been developed by Cognitive Technologies, famous Russian software development company, offering a serious competition to the Abbyy Fine Reader – commercial product. It combines broad experience acquired by Russian scientists with the most advanced achievements in the field of optical recognition as cognitive analysis algorithm, adaptive recognition of characters, meridian segmentation of tables, neuron nets, etc. The software was released to the users as freeware in December, 2007. In September 2008, part of Cuneiform was released as open source software.

CuneiForm is the OmniFont system. Algorithms used in CuneiForm come from the rules of writing of letters, from their topology, and do not require definition of patterns or teaching. CuneiForm recognizes any printing fonts (scanned books, newspapers, magazines, output from laser and dot-matrix printers, text from typewriters, etc.). It does not recognize handwritten or pseudo-handwritten text nor does it recognize decorative fonts (e.g. Gothic). There are special settings in CuneiForm for recognition of text from dot-matrix printer and 200x100 DPI resolution faxes. CuneiForm can save text formatting and recognizes complicated tables of any structure.

Other Features

1. Support of 20 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Mixed Russian-English, Ukrainian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Serbian, Croatian, Polish and others. Every language is supplied with a dictionary which lets do a context check of recognized characters and improve the recognition results.

2. Using built-in text editor, you can easily work with images, tables, columns, various fonts, headers and footers, if manual interaction is needed. Built-in wizards guide you through all stages of scanning and recognition and help to reach the final recognition goal quickly and with high quality and accuracy.

3. Recognition of tables of different structure even with cells not separated by lines.

4. Improved automatic and semiautomatic searching of text, tables and images, which makes the work with documents of complex structure highly flexible, it has also powerful means of manual fragmentation.

5. Ensures scanning from remote scanner in a local network. There can be only one scanner in office, but it can be used by any user in the organization.

Website: http://en.openocr.org/

Download: http://www.cuneiform.ru/downloads/setup_openocr_cuneiform_eng.exe

Convert your Mobile Phone or Digital Camera into a Portable Scanner

How many of you, the readers of this Blog, have private mobile phones? How many of your mobile phones are equipped with camera? Probably, the overwhelming majority… Do you know that your camera can be used for much more than regular pictures taking? Just imagine that you can make a photo of each and every book page and poster, and convert it into the software text file, which you can easily manipulate and edit. What a great solution for:

• Students, spending hours in the public libraries,
• Professional, interesting to input data from the business card automatically in the software format without additional devices,
• Visually-impaired, planning to read clearly the warning message on the bottle with pills on the pharmacy shelf.
• Anybody, seeing interesting article, poster, graphic ads, and many other uses.

Experts forecast, that by 2010, there will be a billion camera phones in the world, half of them with a resolution of at least three megapixels. So, development of the OCR solution based on the low-resolution images comes to the focus of developers in multiple companies. In this post, we will limit our investigation by one of directions: development of the free desktop software that is practically optimized for the data input from your digital camera or mobile phone built-in camera.
The best software I could find on the market for the announced purposes is TopOCR. TopOCR is specifically designed as a simple and user-friendly solution for use with digital camera, smart phone, or camera-equipped media player. The main limitation of the software that it can support only devices with optical resolution of more than 3 MP

The list of the software features, announced by manufacturer, is pretty impressive:

• OCR accuracy of up to 99.8% with a 3 MP camera.
• No limits for amount of pages.
• Handles images with mixed text and graphics (Manual or Auto Zoning).
• Tolerates skew and uneven lighting.
• Multiple text output formats, including searchable PDF and HTML.
• Able to read 11 different languages
• Powerful, easy to use Image Processing with Image Dewarping
• Includes built-in, full featured Text and Image WYSIWYG Editors
• Post-processing spell checker for all 11 languages
• Built-in Text-To-Speech software. OCR to MP3.
• Supports a Command Line Interface and a GUI.

Download the software from the authors’s site: http://www.topocr.com/download.html. If you are devoted fan of the portable applications, as I am, you might be interested in the efforts to convert this application into the portable one: http://portablefreeware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=9812

I am using the offered approach with no difficulties.

If you do not care for a software portability, just use the installation file from the authors; do not spend additional time on these complications. Again, link for downloading:

http://www.topocr.com/download.html

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