Software to Improve OCR Results Based on Output from Multiple OCR Software Packages

Question

Is there an already-existing piece of commercial or academic software that can

• overlay results from multiple OCR packages (Abbyy FineReader, Adobe Acrobat Prof

Answer 1

The idea to use voting between several OCR engines is not new. The thing is that it is not really working. What probably would work if they would be simple classifiers ortogonal by thier nature, then you would combine their votes and improve results. But they all are very complicated software, using quite similar set of well-known approches with little variances, but probably combining them different way and some implementations are better and some are worse.

Experience shows that when you combine several OCR technologies, the best decision rule is to rely on results of most accurate one and just ingore others. From my experience (I work for ABBYY), ABBYY OCR is definetely the most accurate from ones you mentioned.

As far as I know, the only reason to use voting is when you want cross-check "suspicious" characters and send them to manual verification if 100% accuracy is a requirement. Using this approach you increase number of characters to verify, but reduce possibility to miss wrong character.