One of the most commonly asked questions in a document scanning bureau is if it's possible to use data capture to scan and digitise hand-written documents. With the likes of Ancestry.com and other online services which offer the ability to look at older hand-written documents from a time before computers and even typewriters were around offering text-searchable PDF files, a lot of people tend to assume that data capture software, even high quality industry developed wares, can capture handwriting with ease.
Sadly the answer is inevitably no, at least not yet. The trouble is people have different styles of handwriting, different sizes, different stroke lengths and different ways of joining letters together, especially on older documents where people either wrote caligraphically or wrote very messily, neither of which is readable by even the top data capture software.
Some handwriting however can be recognised by computer software but only if it is exceptionally clear, written boldly and printed ie. no connection from letter to letter. However this is very rarely the case and even then the chances of all the wording being accurately recognised is relatively low.
The likes of Ancestry.com will have had each individual file captured by the human eye and written in with the human hand rather than any kind of software or automation process purely because in this instance it adds a better accuracy for the project. This of course would have cost significantly more and you're using a human's labour which of course also makes the process more extended than if it was done by automation. If you have the funding and the need for the documents to be professionally captured, then it is a good choice.
All other types of data capture coming from early typewriters right up to the latest computer fonts of today are easily recognised by industry specialised software used by specialist data capture companies but this is unfortunately as far as it can go.
In the document scanning community there's nothing we'd love more than to be able to accurately produce handwritten documents into a digital format by way of automation or software but, at least in the meantime, this is just not plausible. Give it a couple more years and ask me then and I might just have a different answer for you.
Steve Wright is marketing manager at Pearl Scan Solutions, a UK based document scanning and document management company offering services throughout the UK. Pearl Scan also offer thorough and professional data capture services which we have constantly improved and offered for nearly a decade.
Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Can-A-Data-Capture-Service-Recognise-Handwriting?&id=5891139
Sadly the answer is inevitably no, at least not yet. The trouble is people have different styles of handwriting, different sizes, different stroke lengths and different ways of joining letters together, especially on older documents where people either wrote caligraphically or wrote very messily, neither of which is readable by even the top data capture software.
Some handwriting however can be recognised by computer software but only if it is exceptionally clear, written boldly and printed ie. no connection from letter to letter. However this is very rarely the case and even then the chances of all the wording being accurately recognised is relatively low.
The likes of Ancestry.com will have had each individual file captured by the human eye and written in with the human hand rather than any kind of software or automation process purely because in this instance it adds a better accuracy for the project. This of course would have cost significantly more and you're using a human's labour which of course also makes the process more extended than if it was done by automation. If you have the funding and the need for the documents to be professionally captured, then it is a good choice.
All other types of data capture coming from early typewriters right up to the latest computer fonts of today are easily recognised by industry specialised software used by specialist data capture companies but this is unfortunately as far as it can go.
In the document scanning community there's nothing we'd love more than to be able to accurately produce handwritten documents into a digital format by way of automation or software but, at least in the meantime, this is just not plausible. Give it a couple more years and ask me then and I might just have a different answer for you.
Steve Wright is marketing manager at Pearl Scan Solutions, a UK based document scanning and document management company offering services throughout the UK. Pearl Scan also offer thorough and professional data capture services which we have constantly improved and offered for nearly a decade.
Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Can-A-Data-Capture-Service-Recognise-Handwriting?&id=5891139
No comments:
Post a Comment