Using Tesseract for handwriting recognition

Question

I was just wondering how accurate can tesseract be for handwriting recognition if used with capital letters all in their own little boxes in a form.

I know you can train it to recognise your own handwriting somewhat but the problem in my case is I need to use it across multiple handwritings. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

In short, you would have to train the Tesseract engine to recognize the handwriting. Take a look at this link:

Tesseract handwriting with dictionary training

This is what the linked post says:

It's possible to train tesseract to recognize handwriting. Here are the instructions: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/wiki/TrainingTesseract3

But don't expect very good results. Academics have typically gotten accuracy results topping out about 90%. Here are a couple references for words and numbers. So if your use case can deal with at least 1/10 errors, this might work for you.

Also here is a good academic article written on this subject:

Recognition of Handwritten Textual Annotations using Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine for information Just In Time (iJIT)