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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS• WeOCR system has become a nice building block for various OCR application software / servers inthe Grid/Cloud Computing era. Some interesting applications have been developed and become popular,especially on Smart Phones. In other words, WeOCR has been successful in expanding OCR applications andin providing developers with ready-to-use OCR engines.• Full-featured OCR with strong document layout analysis is obviously desired. On the other hand,even a single-character recognition feature has been proved to be quite useful in various applications.• Despite the open, Grid-oriented design of WeOCR, our laboratory is currently the only serviceprovider. None of the commercial servers is known to have WeOCR-compatible Web API. Our idea of“Grid-style open OCR servers” has not been successful yet.• A popular complaint from the users is about the precision of the OCR engines. As long as we useOpen Source OCR engines, the precision is limited in general. There is an urgent need to provide the userswith better OCR engines online.If some state-of-the-art OCR engines are registered, WeOCR (OCRGrid) system will be very useful notonly for end-users worldwide but also for researchers and developers working on OCR systems. We wouldlike to encourage many developers and researchers to provide WeOCR services of their own. Our futurework includes investigating the feasibility of OCRGrid platform further, developing some applications andarchitectures to draw synergetic effects, and refinement of WeOCR API and toolkit.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research No.18650036 mainly, and No.22300194partially, from JSPS, Japan. The author would like to thank all the developers of WeOCR client applicationsand services.REFERENCESGoto, H. and Kaneko, S., 2004. Synergetic OCR : A Framework for Network-oriented Cooperative OCR Systems.Proceeding Image and Vision Computing New Zealand 2004 (IVCNZ2004), pp.35-40.Goto, H., 2006. OCRGrid : A Platform for Distributed and Cooperative OCR Systems. Proceedings of 18th InternationalConference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR2006), pp.982-985.Goto, H., 2007. An Overview of the WeOCR System and a Survey of its Use. Proceeding Image and Vision ComputingNew Zealand 2007 (IVCNZ2007), pp.121-125.Goto, H. and Tanaka, M., 2009. Text-Tracking Wearable Camera System for the Blind, Proceedings of 10thInternational Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2009), Volume 1, pp.141-145.Koga, M. et al, 2005. Camera-based Kanji OCR for Mobile-phones: Practical Issues. Proceedings of 8th InternationalConference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2005), pp.635-639.Meijer, P., 1996. Seeing with Sound – The vOICe – (website), http://www.seeingwithsound.com/Miyao, H. et al, 2004. Printed Japanese Character Recognition Using Multiple Commercial OCRs. Journal of AdvancedComputational Intelligence, Vol.8, pp.200-207.Smith, R., 2007. An overview of the Tesseract OCR Engine. Proceedings of 9th International Conference on DocumentAnalysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2007), Volume II, pp.629-633.Tabaru, H. and Nakano, Y., 1998. A Printed Japanese Recognition System Using Majority Logic. Proceedings of ThirdIAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS’98), pp.185-188.48