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IMPACT OCR in a nutshell Clemens Neudecker, National Library of the Netherlands IMPACT Demo Day, Biblioteca Nacional de España

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OCR Process <ul><li>Binarisation </li></ul><ul><li>= transform greyscale or colour images to bitonal (b/w) </li></ul><ul><li>in order to separate foreground (text) from background </li></ul><ul><li>Segmentation </li></ul><ul><li>= detection of layout elements in hierarchical order </li></ul><ul><li>(blocks/regions, lines, words, glyphs) </li></ul><ul><li>Pattern Matching (Recognition) </li></ul><ul><li>= matching of character shapes with internal font database (classifiers) </li></ul>

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ABBYY FineReader <ul><li>Main OCR technology provider in IMPACT </li></ul><ul><li>OCR technologies experts since 30 years </li></ul><ul><li>IMPACT uses FineReader Engine (SDK) </li></ul>

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Binarisation

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Adaptive Binarisation Original scan Prev. binarization New binarization

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IMPACT Binarisation <ul><li>Original </li></ul><ul><li>State of the Art </li></ul><ul><li>IMPACT </li></ul>

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Segmentation Blocks/Regions Words Glyphs

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IMPACT Segmentation example Pre-Impact FR Engine 9 FR Engine 10 Part of column was misclassified as image

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IMPACT Segmentation example v. 9 v. 10 Linear word order errors

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IMPACT Segmentation example v. 9 v. 10 Lost text

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Fraktur recognition

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Languages and Dictionaries <ul><li>Goal: </li></ul><ul><ul><li>Develop an interface so that external dictionaries can be integrated into the FineReader Engine </li></ul></ul><ul><li>2008 - 2009: </li></ul><ul><ul><li>External Dictionary beta interface </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Same quality as with internal dictionaries possible </li></ul></ul><ul><li>2010 - 2011: </li></ul><ul><ul><li>Make interface work reliably </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Teach partners how to use it </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Support for any language, any time period </li></ul></ul>

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ALTO: New native export format <ul><li>Available since FRE 10 R2 </li></ul><ul><li>Supports most recent schema: ALTO v. 2.0 </li></ul><ul><li>Line coordinates available </li></ul>

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Thank you! Questions?