WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010Table 2. WeOCR client software. (as of Sept. 2010)Name Platform DescriptionThe vOICe server (server) e-mail interface for mobile camera phonesWordSnapOCR Android Proof-of-concept application for word input using camera onAndroidKanji YomiEigo YomiKanji Yomi LiteAndroidKanji/English reader with online Kanji-English dictionary look-upfunctionC’est What? Android, iPhone A mobile OCR & translation application for iPhone and AndroidWWWJDIC for Android Android frontend for WWWJDICAndroidReading Assistant– online editionWindows A proof-of-concept toy Reading Assistant for helping the visuallyimpaired(developed by the author)3.3 Extensions of WeOCR and OCR EngineDuring the WeOCR usage observation, we have recognized a need for single-character recognition inJapanese and Chinese. Looking-up individual Kanji (or Han character) is a popular way of finding themeaning, stroke order, similar characters, etc. Figure 5 shows an example of single Kanji look-up.Although single-character recognition mode was taken into account in the early design of WeOCRtoolkit, we have revised the API and defined a new data structure so that client programs can receive sometop candidates of characters. We have also added single-character mode to the OCR engine NHocr to fulfillthe demands in some applications. NHocr produces a few top candidates of characters, and this functionallows the end-user to choose a correctly recognized character.Figure 5. Character recognition and Kanji look-up by Kanji Yomi4. CONCLUSIONSWe have introduced WeOCR system, which was designed to realize a distributed, cooperative, synergeticOCR environment, and described the results of a feasibility study on the web-based OCR system. We havebeen operating the world’s first and only Grid-style web-based OCR servers for almost five years. Accordingto the usage statistics, the number of accesses to the servers has soared significantly. The followingconclusions have been drawn.• There are a lot of applications of OCR in which privacy does not matter. Many people are willing touse online OCR despite the privacy concerns. Actually, some commercial web-based OCR services havebeen launched these couple of years.47