Kai Ponte skrev:
On Sunday 18 March 2007 02:57:49 am Anders Norrbring wrote:
Does anybody know of a way to scan several thousands pictures on disk
with an OCR application to look for a specific text, and then list the
images where that text was found?
I've been doing apps like that for the better part of twelve years. However,
I've yet to see an OCR app in Linux. That doesn't mean they don't exist,
however, because I'm stuck in a predominantly windows world at work. I know
we currently either use OCR For Anydocs or Kofax Ascent. In fact, we're
looking at replacing our current systems in the next few years.
What you will need to do is probably write some program to take the imaged
documents - done so with whatever scanner you've got - and then process the
documents through the OCR engine supplied by the manufacturer. Typically this
is a library like the AVI or MP3 libraries used by your most commonly
requested SUSE applications.
Keep in mind, that you'll need to also have a retrieval program of some sort,
to actually get the documents and view them - along with the OCR data - in
some manner. This is one I wrote in 2003, which combined OCR from barcode
and an imaging application based on FileNet:
http://www.filesite.org/viewtopic.php?t=173
You didn't mention whether you're doing spot or forms recognition or full-text
OCR. You might also look at barcode recognition, because those are VERY
reliable, even over fax.
Try these links for the OCR software:
Google apparently has an OCR engine that is now OSS..
http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/08/announcing-tesseract-ocr.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tesseract-ocr
..never heard of it before this morning. Should be interesting to look at
though. Apparently it is an old HP-based software that had been shelved for
twelve years and now resurrected.
ABBYY is a well-known industrial-strength app for OCR. I've never personally
used them (mostly stick with Caere) but have heard great things....AND...they
have an SDK for *nix and/or TheCultOfMac.
http://www.abbyy.com/sdk/?param=59956
I aslo saw this one...
http://www.linux-ocr.ekitap.gen.tr/
Keep in mind that we process over 3M documents/year - that comes out to
roughly 15,000 every day, including weekends. We currently have eight
high-speed scanners, and are evaluating whether to purchase some new Kodak
i860 models at $75,000 each. I just state this so you know our volume.
Thanks, I'm not locked to Linux for this adventure, but the images are
stored on a Linux system but can be accessed from Windows.
Maybe I should explain more what I'm about to do, it's not really a full
text scan..
The images are from a dozen or so different photographers, who all put
their copyright notice in text on every image. What I want to accomplish
is to categorize them all according to who took the picture, in other
words, sort them by photographer name. So, the OCR should only read one
or two words out of a maximum of 4-6 words somewhere in the image.
It's also a one-time thing to do, so I cannot motivate a license cost
for a fully fledged OCR suite.
I'll take a look at the links you provided, thanks!
--
Anders Norrbring
Norrbring Consulting
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
