Announcing the OCRopus Open Source OCR System (Google Research)

From the good people of /. [Slashdot]

Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will "advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies". The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use."

Google is "hoping for contributions by the open source community in areas such as adapting the system to additional languages, creating a Gnome desktop application, integration with Gnome desktop search, web-based tools for proofing and training, language modeling, additional character recognition engines, and other useful tools and add-ons."

Late last year Google announced their intention to release (re-release?) Tesseract OCR, an obscure open-source program apparently familiar to only the most ardent Linux developer.