I've got client that would like to capture data from a handwritten form.
I have no idea how to implement this or what the cost would be. First, is this feasable/reasonable/affordable for a smallish size client. Second, how does intelligent character recognition work. (Do I need a ICR device? In what form does the data get extracted? How reliable is it?)
I did google this stuff, but more interested in first-hand experiences if any.
I haven't done character recognition specifically, but I would start by applying some basic edge detection to the image. You should be able to use an edge list for each character in the image to match it to a character.
Well if you could get it to work properly, I guess you would be rich
Worth looking into: http://www.visionobjects.com/products/software-development-kits/
I noticed it under the splash screen for livescribe, who's recognition is great.
You could possibly do something with Mechanical Turk or a similar service that allows the data entry to be outsourced to data entry operators (probably offshore). For handwritten data this is likely to work somewhat better than attempting OCR.
Just as an aside, the Captchas used by SO are part of a Mechanical Turk style programme called reCaptcha to pick up gaps in scanned texts where OCR failed.
Depending on your needs, you might want to check out OpenCV : http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencv/
OpenCV is a computer vision library originally developed by Intel. It is free for commercial and research use under a BSD license. The library is cross-platform, and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, PSP, VCRT (Real-Time OS on Smart camera) and other embedded devices.
This is definitely one of those things you would want to purchase or leverage the work that someone else has done rather than try to write in house. There are very, very few companies that could consider this their 'core competency.' As was mentioned, even the best aren't perfect and have flaws. In order to find out if it is feasible financially, you would need to evaluate the technologies out there, see how much a valid solution that meets the client's need would cost (licensing, etc. plus your fees to do the work), and then find out if the client is willing to pay it.
LiveScribe. They've just released their SDK. We're doing the same thing. The device is simply awesome and the SDK is quite easy to get into.