OCR solution that detects numeric handwriting?

Question

Is there a solution that does a good job at numeric (1-10) handwriting? I tried tesseract but I'm getting only garbage.

Ideally OSS, but commercial would be OK too.

Answer 1

OpenCV now comes with handwritten digit recognition OCR sample. You can refer to it : http://code.opencv.org/projects/opencv/repository/revisions/master/entry/samples/python2/digits.py

It uses both kNN and SVM to train some handwritten digits and then apply OCR on it.

Below is the output of kNN training (it has an error of only 3.5%) :

Answer 2

I came across your post while doing a search and it drew me into some interesting research. I'll share some of my findings with you and the forum:

Research into handwriting recognition (ICR, neural-network-based) and resulting OCR solutions have really taken off of late. Many algorithms have been proposed in the last decade, still handwriting recognition remains a challenge!

First, some pointers to free programming resources (MB, you say nothing about your programming environment or OS, so my suggestions cover mainly Windows.)

1. www.codeproject.com/Articles/143059/Neural-Network-for-Recognition-of-Handwritten-Digi That's the page of the Neural Network for Recognition of Handwritten Digits in C# This is a rudimentary rework, in C#, of Mike O'Neill's Neural Network for Recognition of Handwritten Digits which employs the MFC/C++ model. More about O'Neill's work here: www.codeproject.com/KB/library/NeuralNetRecognition.aspx.

2. http://asprise.com/product/ocr/selector.php Their solution is for Visual Basic, so Windows is the main appeal, but I see they support Linux, Mac OS and some flavors of UNIX. The SDKs are free! Download from here: www.asprise.com/product/ocr/download.php?lang=vb

   (I have seen positive feedback about asprise on another place in this forum: Window 7 OCR API)

3. Here's another great resource - a handwriting database for testing OCR abilities, here: www.yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/index.html That's the main page of the MNIST database of handwritten digits (60,000 examples, and a test set of 10,000 examples) The site says that the digits have already been size-normalized and centered in a fixed-size image, so you can concentrate on learning techniques and pattern recognition methods on real-world data and minimize efforts on preprocessing and formatting.

   MNIST is a (free) subset of the larger, NIST database, available (at a cost) here: www.nist.gov/srd/nistsd19.cfm

Commercial solutions

1. www.captricity.com/handwriting-ocr-software/ This solution handles ANY free-form handwriting inputs.

   The software transform all static documents, on paper, PDFs, fax, efax, and also handwriting and human mark-up of any kind. They have "pay as you go" model (10 pages for free) and a minimal paid solution of $75/month.

2. www.cvisiontech.com/trapeze/general/trapeze.html?lang=eng CVISION's Trapeze for Forms processes handwriting inputs inside field-data from structured forms.

   It validates the information and outputs this information into a document database.

HTH some!