Search Engines for Handwritten Documents

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Massachusetts have created a tool for automatically searching handwritten historical documents, such as the 140,000 pages that make up George Washington's personal papers in the Library of Congress. The most interesting part is that the papers are scanned versions of the originals and the search tool actually recognizes the handwritten text from these images."

Who still reads those?

[Anonymous Coward]

In America, handwriting is only for old people.

Doc

[savagedome]

Huh? Well, lets see how well it keeps up with my doctor's handwriting...

This is so cool!

[raehl]

Somebody invented a way for computers to recognize handwriting.

Like, so 10 years ago.

Re:Hard to read!

[kfg]

It looks completely foreing to me. . .

That's because it's written in a dead language.

English.

KFG

Uh Oh

[griffitts]

The article points out that the handwriting reader is a Newton.

Yes, but what they don't tell you...

[aristus]

You have to be able to handle a quill pen to use it.

Good Work!

[CaptainCarrot]

How pleafant that they've done what waf neceffary to make this happen. How did they train the foftware to recognize the quirky 18th Century handwriting?

Re:Who still reads those?

[Sheepdot]

I write out my checks in cursive. The other day I was admiring how pretty my cursive looked and how well it had developed from when I was in second grade and told to "TRY HARDER WEAKLING OR YOU WILL NEVER GET A JOB!". Then I realized just how ghey it was that I was enjoying the sight of it and hurridly gave it to the cashier... who was a guy... who (ick) winked at me.

Re:This is nothing new

[js7a]

Vannivar Bush [uni-sb.de] described it before anyone could do it. Actualy maybe Babbage and Lovelace, Asimov, and/or probably someone like Jay Williams [amazon.com] did a better job.

Re:The search tool?

[TykeClone]

We could use it as a jobs program for monks. Their predecessors wrote the manuscripts, and now they could transcribe them into digital form...

It's not OCR

[Anonymous Cowdog]

It's "Pixelative Text Cognizance."

It's different. With OCR these rays of light scan the original, translate each scanpoint to discrete RGB values, and do pattern recognition.

With this system, they just read the discrete RGB values directly from pixels of documents scanned in with rays of light, then they do recognition of patterns. See, it's totally different.

National Treasure

[Torgo's Pizza]

If only Nicholas Cage had this tool at his disposal, it would have made things much, much easier.

Re:It's not OCR

[GigsVT]

I'm not sure what's more funny, your post, or that it was modded "informative". :)

Re:Umm

[KillerDeathRobot]

Yeah, it would have been much more "interesting" if the papers were, I don't know, read psychically by the computer or something.

Re:Good Work!

[That's Unpossible!]

How pleafant that they've done what waf neceffary to make this happen.

Personally, I think it fucks.

Re:Umm

[ZagNuts]

How else would it search handwritten documents? Am I missing something here?

You write down exactly what you want to find in exactly the same handwriting that the document is written in and then it blocks scans it for what you wrote... duh.

spoofing

[sewagemaster]

great. now people are just going to spoof documents and put pr0n or enlargement spams in the pdfs when i search for anything academic related. i'm glad i dont have that problem yet finding pdf papers via google yet.