job.vandoeselaar@ivdnt.org, Author at IMPACT Centre of Competence

IMPACT Final Conference – Evaluation of lexicon supported OCR and information retrieval

Jesse De Does from the INL gave a brief but rich presentation on the evaluation of lexicon supported OCR and the project’s recent improvements. To evaluate lexica in OCR, the FineReader SDK 10 is used. In short, the software measures OCR with a default included dictionary, and, for each word or fuzzy set, it gives … Continue reading

IMPACT Final Conference-Overview of language work in IMPACT

Katrien Depuydt provided a brief overview of the IMPACT project’s work packages devoted to creating language tools and lexicon to aid in both information retrieval and OCR processing. How might one measure successful improvement to the access of text? She cleverly posits that the key will be in asking ourselves: “Can we handle the “world”? … Continue reading

IMPACT Final Conference – Post-Correction on IMPACT with Ulrich Reffle

Developing a unique user tool with a team led by Prof. Schulz, Ulrich Reffle along with Annette Gotscharek, Christoph Ringlstetter and Thorsten Vobl. at the University of Munich have potentially revolutionised the speed at which researchers can analyse texts.

IMPACT Final Conference-Crowdsourcing in the Digitalkoot Project

DIGI-to digitise Talkoot-people gathering to work together voluntarily (without payment). Majilis Bremer-Laamanen (National Library of Finland) shares their unique experiment in crowdsourcing OCR correction through gaming with their Digitalkoot Project launched February 2011.

IMPACT Final Conference – IBM Adaptive OCR Engine and CONCERT Cooperative Correction

Asaf Tzadok (IBM Haifa Research Lab) showed us IBM’s CONCERT tool which facilitates collaborative OCR correction. CONCERT (Cooperative Engine for the Correction of Extracted Text) works in three steps: character session, word session and page-level session.

IMPACT Final Conference – Evaluation Tools, Ground Truth and Datasets: Stefan Pletschacher

Stefan Pletschacher (University of Salford) began by presenting an overview of the digitisation workflow and the issues at each stage. These stages are usually given as scanning (whatever goes wrong here is hard to recover later) image enhancement, layout analysis, OCR and post processing. He explained that you should evaluate at each step but should … Continue reading

IMPACT Final Conference – Experiences in Mass Digitisation with the California Digital Library

Paul Fogel, Technical Lead of the Mass Digitisation team at the California Digital Library (CDL), presented digitisation experiences and challenges faced by CDL when dealing with OCR document text extraction. Fogel emphasised the difficulties and obstacles posed by bad OCR during the mass indexing and digitisation processes of cultural records: marginalia, image-text misinterpretations and fonts, … Continue reading

IMPACT Final Conference – Case study: Scanning Parameters

Apostolos Antonacopoulos’ (University of Salford) session presented and analysed the effects of scanning parameters on OCR quality, as well as the issues regarding storage and maintenance costs for Content Holders. Different experiments were carried out in order to establish scanning effects on OCR quality, including colour vs greyscale vs bitonal, effects on resolution and the … Continue reading

IMPACT Final Conference: 1st Keynote: The Strategic Digital Overview

Richard Boulderstone, Director of eStrategy and Programs at the British Library, kicked off the IMPACT Conference this morning with a suitably impactful statement of scope: the British Library, he estimates, has nearly 5 billion physical pages in a 150 million object collection.

IMPACT Final Conference – BL 24-25th October 2011 British Library

Today is the IMPACT Final Conference to be held at the British Library. The IMPACT team will be blogging summaries of all the main sessions. The programme is available from the IMPACT Web site.