Omnifont OCR for Fraktur and old European language recognition

FineReader XIX

You can order this product FineReader XIX directly at the vendor now (list of items)

FineReader XIX is a special version of the award-winning FineReader optical character recognition (OCR) software for recognising "fraktur" or "black letter" texts from the period between 1800 and 1938. It is designed to convert scans of old documents, books, and papers into text for the purpose of digital archiving and publishing.
FineReader XIX is the omnifont OCR for Fraktur, giving users a solution for scanning and converting old documents with minimal training and dictionary work. This was achieved by combining extremely intelligent technology with dedicated linguistic study:
OCR systems work by analysing a text image and making a hypothesis about which letter or word an image repre­sents. The hypotheses are analysed in context and verified by use of sophisticated OCR dictionaries made up of Language Models (LMs). Language Models are computer databases that describe the vocabulary of a language. The problem is that modern OCR systems do not have LMs for older text fonts and older text spellings. The solution for Fraktur text recognition was achieved through the development of OCR dictionaries specifically for this time period. Special language models were created for five European languages.
The Fraktur language models were created with the help of ATAPY Software. Through the development process, 10 different dictionaries and more than 105 books published between 1 808 and 1 930 were analysed. Linguists reviewed word stock, identified words that have phased out through the evolution of the languages, and identified the correct paradigm assignments for synchronising the language models with the appropriate grammar usage for the time period. More than 500.000 word entries were manually compared with existing FineReader dictionaries. Grammatical paradigms and word evolutions were reviewed to add 159 historic grammar paradigms that were missing from the contemporary language models. Language models were then compiled and tested on a control group of testing documents featuring old text.
To recognise the Fraktur style fonts, ABBYY created special classifiers, or alphabets, capable of recognising the Fraktur symbols. As part of this effort, the ABBYY development teams collected a symbol image base with an average of 2500 symbol samples for each symbol, a new alphabet pattern, and collected and input a sample test base representing 31000 pages of text from different sources. Using the sample text, the recognition engine was "fine-tuned" to work with the subtle features of the Fraktur alphabet (such as the ligatures, or connected letters). The new alphabet was then added to the FineReader system and interface and tested extensively.
FineReader XIX was developed with the needs of universities and research center in mind. The product was developed in cooperation with the worldwide METAe Project. METAe is a consortium of libraries and digitisation companies from across Europe who are working together to create the METAe Engine, a software package specifically designed for organising the work flow of the archiving and conversion of historical materials such as books, journals, magazines and newspapers. FineReader XIX will provide a key component for archiving some of Europe's most priceless historical documents. Partners in the METAe project include: the Univeristy of Innsbruck (Austria), University of Florence (Italy) Bibliotéque Nationale de France, the National Library of Norway, the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation (Germany), CCS Compact Computer Systeme (Germany), and Cornell University Library (USA).

FineReader XIX support for Fraktur includes

• Languages: German, English, French, Italian, and Spanish
• Fonts: Fraktur, Schwabacher, and a majority of Textura (Gothic) fonts

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