OCR of handwriting photo

[Paul Tang]

Hello

My first post, but a long time user of Pleco on my iPhone. As someone who has limited Chinese (a little Hakka, and a bit of Cantonese), this app is used constantly by me to help with translation with my parents). It's a godsend!

I'm having some trouble with OCR of my mum's handwriting. She wrote the names of my two children on a piece of paper, and which I took a photo of, and then imported into Pleco using 'Still OCR' but Pleco had a lot of trouble recognising any of the characters (see below). I tried isolating the box to a single character, but still no joy.

Any idea what might be going on? Strokes too spaced out?

In the end, I asked my mum to input the characters by hand on the iPhone



Thanks in advance, Paul.

 

[mikelove]

Thank you very much!

I'm afraid OCR is only designed for printed text; doesn't work for handwriting unless you're a calligrapher, basically. It might seem like a similar problem to Chinese handwriting input, but the actual algorithms are quite different. However, our handwriting recognizer is quite forgiving, so if you try transcribing these characters into that you should hopefully have better luck.

 

[Paul Tang]

Thanks Mike.

Yes, that's what I did in the end and used the handwriting recognizer. Of course, it worked without any problems.