I used to work for an OCR company (Kurzweil, a division of Xerox; now Xerox Advanced Imaging). The OCR software they had did better than 95% over 10 years ago. And yes, you could run on a 286. The trick was to use a board plugged into the 286 which itself had enough horsepower (a Motorola cpu) to do the job. I actually started a project to develop a Windows (version 1.3!) driver for this, but at the time Xerox had no interest in Windows. So the project was cancelled and the Windows people essentially dismissed. Xerox now has a Windows product called TextBridge. At 12:35 PM 1/3/97 -0500, /**\\anonymous/**\\" <panther@iglou.com> wrote:

Alan Olsen wrote:

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I used to work for a company that would transfer entire archives of medical journals. Much of it we would just OCR. Some of it we would send off shore. The OCR software was about 95% reliable and this was over 5 years ago. (And we were using 286 boxes for much of the OCR work. Not a heavy technoligical investment.) I am sure that things have improved a great deal since then. (My new scanner included OCR software. I will have to run a test and report the findings.

I'd like to know what OCR software you were using. All tests we completed at my place of employment were very poor quality wise. We showed a %65 accuracy rate. Not very good when you need to transfer a five year backlog of medical and technical journals. This was using a high resolution scanner with a package that was bundled along with it. About a year ago, my employer considered transfering data taken off of forms into a relational database using an OCR program. Again, we found the findings to be too innacurate for our needs. I may have just been using the wrong programs for the job, but the findings were depressing...

panther

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