OCR error correction methods and apparatus utilizing contextual comparison
US5850480A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventor
Key dates
| Filing date | May 30, 1996 |
| Grant date | Dec 15, 1998 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | May 30, 2016 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06V30/10
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
The present invention includes methods of correcting optical character recognition errors occurring during recognition of alphanumeric character strings contained within one or more predetermined types of alphanumeric character fields. The methods may be practiced with a document processing system having (1) a optical character recognition device for scanning documents and outputting bit-map image data; (2) a recognition engine for converting the bit-map image data into possibly correct alphanumeric characters with associated confidence values; and (3) at least one lexicon of character strings consisting of a list of at least a portion of all of the possible character string values for each of the fields being processed. The present invention corrects OCR errors by performing a contextual comparison analysis between the alphanumeric characters outputted from the recognition engine and the lexicon of character strings. A number of preferred embodiments, and several examples of the type of information which can be processed by those embodiments, are disclosed.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.