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CuneiForm (software)

In computer software, CuneiForm is an OCR tool. It was originally developed at Cognitive Technologies and after few years with no development released as freeware on December 12, 2007. The kernel of OCR engine is released as open source since the beginning of April 2008.

Features

CuneiForm is the OmniFont system. Algorithms used in CuneiForm come from the rules of writing of letters, from their topology, and do not require definition of patterns or teaching. CuneiForm recognizes any printing fonts (scanned books, newspapers, magazines, printings from laser and dot-matrix printers, texts from typewriters, etc). It does not recognize handwritten or pseudo-handwritten text nor does it recognize decorative fonts (e.g. Gothic). There are special settings in CuneiForm for recognition of texts from dot-matrix printer and 200x100 DPI resolution faxes.

CuneiForm can save text formatting and recognizes complicated tables of any structure.

It recognizes Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Russian-English bilingual, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian texts.

CuneiForm can save recognized text in RTF, HTML or text format. It can also pass text to Word text processor or Excel spreadsheet.

On-line recognition service

In June, 2008 Cognitive Technologies launched free on-line recognition service on OpenOCR.org Before its launch 10 000 recognitions per day using this service were planned by the end of 2008.

History

Once leader of OCR software in Russia, CuneiForm was in competition with Abbyy Fine Reader.

In 1993, Cognitive Technologies made an OEM-contract with Corel Corporation, which allowed the Cognitive recognition library to be built into the popular publishing package Corel Draw 3.0 (and subsequent versions).

In 1996, OCR CuneiForm'96 was released, which was the first OCR package to include the adaptive recognition™ method of character recognition. This is method based on a combination of two types of printed characters recognition algorithms: multifont and omnifont. This self-learning system is capable of recognizing poorly printed symbols by creating an internal font generated by those symbols which were printed well enough to be recognized. Thus dynamic adjustment (adaptation) for specific input characters is used.

Future

Cognitive Technologies started a program to make OCR available for all users. Its first step was releasing CuneiForm as freeware.

Cognitive Technologies plans to start developing a new version of the software as an investor and coordinator of the project. Developers decided to choose the BSD license for kernel release to take into account all legal and technical nuances, but the whole program or its separate modules may be released later upon GPL.

At the moment (September 2008) not every part of the Cuneiform is released as open source. Missing parts are table analysis and interface. However, Cognitive people promised to release these components in future.