Hi everyone
I need to use an OCR component within a .NET application that can recognise handwriting. We got the MODI component from MS office up and running, and it recognises printed text, but not handwriting.
I don't mind paying.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
Many thanks Jim
I recommend Pegasus Imaging, we use it every day and it is great. For handwriting you have the ICR module.
Most OCR toolkits are aimed at recognizing printed text, not handwritten text. I would recommend Atalasoft's toolkit for flexibility in that you can plug-in various OCR engines.
Recognizing handwritten text is much less accurate and more difficult. It is usually labelled as Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), and I am not sure whether Atalasoft, Pegasus, or most commercial products support ICR. Hand-written recognition is aided by writing each letter in a cell on a grid, like filling out your name on the SAT. Are you talking about free form text or writing on a grid?
Try tessnet, it's an open-source .NET OCR engine based on tesseract
It's important to distinguish between hand-printed text and cursive script writing. The term ICR generally is used to refer to hand-printed text.
Accusoft Pegasus provides a SmartZone ICR .NET SDK that can get you recognizing text very quickly. Accuracy get better and better as you gain control over how the text is entered, such as on a form, etc.
It also is important to realize that the cues available to real-time recognition, such as on a tablet PC, are completely different than those available in a scanned image. This is why cursive recognition is so much easier in real-time than after the fact (scanned image). You can read the movements of the pen, and the order of strokes is very helpful in recognition.