The discussion revolves around the extraction of mathematical symbols from scanned journal pages, particularly focusing on the challenges and technologies involved in making scanned documents searchable and editable. It touches on the use of optical character recognition (OCR) and the potential for AI to improve recognition accuracy.
Participants express a range of views on the effectiveness of OCR and the challenges of recognizing mathematical symbols. There is no consensus on the best approach or the reliability of current technologies, indicating ongoing debate and uncertainty.
Limitations include the potential for OCR to misinterpret text, especially in older documents, and the dependency on context for accurate recognition of mathematical content. The discussion does not resolve these issues.
It works quite well these days but I read a lot of books (obviously scanned) on my Kindle and there are one or two mistakes in most of the books. Context usually digs me out of the problem but the Maths in some papers could produce undetectable errors (undetectable by my Maths brain, at least).pbuk said:Optical character recognition (OCR).
That sounds v intelligent. You mean an improved bolt on when the context reads as garbage? It's a matter of spotting an error in the first place.jedishrfu said:In addition, PDF tools may allow for edits of the searchable text when OCR fails to recognize some scripts.
That could be very demanding. It could involve parsing an equation and working out its meaning from the context. Sort of thing that only an expert in the field of the paper could do. But never say never, about computing.robphy said:A new technology is trying to extract mathematical symbols from handwriting and from scanned images