Handwriting recognition in scans

[compukortschnoi]

Hello there,

is there any macOS app out there having an OCR for handwriting? I know there is Ink as a built-in feature in macOS, but a graphic tablet needs to be installed to access this feature. But even then, Ink seems to be unable to recognize handwriting in already existing scans.

I'm looking forward to your answers.

Best regards,
compukortschnoi

 

[960design]

ICR is still a little further on the side of science fiction than reality.
Check this out:
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1003/1003.5893.pdf

 

[ZapNZs]

I do not personally know of software that runs on the macOS platform, offers ICR capability, and is flexible enough to do this with scanned documents. Could you describe the situation you wish to deploy ICR in?

I agree that ICR still has some limitations. If the recognition accuracy is not high, the manual data correction, and high validation QA/QC, could potentially result in a less efficient operation than just hiring staff for manual entry.

ABBYY FlexiCapturePro captures handwriting quite accurately, but this depends on several factors such as the quality of the print, the quality of the scan (TIF, 400 DPI, grayscale seems to work best), the form design (fields where you write one capitalized letter in a single constrained print field are extremely accurate (98%+ with good form design) - image fields with free-hand print are more variable), and if using any of the contextual word matching it can also depend on the regional dialect used and if the software understands this. Unfortunately, it is Windows-only and costs more than a loaded 15-inch MBP.

A2ia has software that can recognize free-hand cursive (and surprisingly well, at that). They call it Intelligent Word Recognition. Their ability to merge OMR, OCR, ICR, and IWR into a single package offers nice flexibility, and their IWR is impressive even though the technology is still in its infancy. I imagine their add-on recognition engines cost more than a loaded iMac Pro.