Handwritten OCR capabilities. How to train the engine

[cf.an...@gmail.com]

Hello all,

I have been to the painful job of training tesseract and learn about it just to be quite disappointed.

I am hoping that OCROPUS is easier.

First question I would like to ask is to learn about any kind of documentation on how to train it for handwritten recognition.

Has anyone tried it? I need a OCR engine that can do both handwritten and normal typewriter recognition from older forms.

Also, is there any image preparation that I need to go over before using the engine?

As I am new to it, I appreciate any pointers specially those related to handwritten recognition.

Thanks.

[Raj Julha]

I tried historic handwritten documents with version 0.4.4 for my final year dissertation and failed. The main issue I had was the character breakdown, the tool didn't separate the characters correctly so I couldn't create a set of training data. I haven't tried the latest version  so cannot comment on that.

Good luck

Raj

[Tom]

The latest version of OCRopus (0.7) has a new recognizer based on recurrent neural networks.

It should be easy to train for printed materials, but it probably isn't so good for handwritten inputs in the current release.

Tom