At the frontiers of OCR

It is argued that it is time for a major change of approach to optical character recognition (OCR) research. The traditional approach, focusing on the correct classification of isolated characters, has been exhausted. The demonstration of the superiority of a new classification method under operational conditions requires large experimental facilities and databases beyond the resources of most researchers. In any case, even perfect classification of individual characters is insufficient for the conversion of complex archival documents to a useful computer-readable form. Many practical OCR tasks require integrated treatment of entire documents and well-organized typographic and domain-specific knowledge. New OCR systems should take advantage of the typographic uniformity of paragraphs or other layout components. They should also exploit the unavoidable interaction with human operators to improve themselves without explicit 'training'. >