Google backs character-recognition research —-WOW!
Google is sponsoring an artifical-intelligence research group’s work to develop advanced technologies for character recognition.
The open-source project, Ocropus, has several goals, including developing a high-level, easy-to-use handwriting system that can convert handwritten documents to computer text, assisting in the creation of electronic libraries, analyzing historical documents and helping vision-impaired people access information. The “ocr” in Ocropus stands for optimal character recognition.
The project is headquartered at the Image Understanding and Pattern Recognition (UIPR) research group at the German Center For Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. DFKI Professor Thomas Bruerl is leading the project.
(Kaiserslautern is located 80 miles southwest of Frankfurt near the town of Ramstein Air Base and serves as headquarters for U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) and is also a NATO installation).
Breuel made the annoucement through a post on the Google Code blog. In addition to Google’s sponsorship, Ocropus is getting funds from several German government agencies and other public and private entities.
——-Just imagine how wonderful this will be for those with seeing disabilities as well as preserving those documents which are now stored in court houses, libraries, governmental offices, etc.
This was reported by Caroline McCarthy of CNET.News.com – read the full story here.
Jawohl, mein freund.
Morgan
