Abstract
We present experimental results suggesting that between 20 and 50% of the errors caused by a single OCR package can be eliminated by simply scanning a page three times and running a “consensus sequence” voting procedure. This technique, which originates from molecular biology, takes exponential time in general, but can be specialized to a fast heuristic guaranteed to be optimal for the cases of interest. The improvement in recognition accuracy is achieved without making
a prioriassumptions about the distribution of OCR errors (i.e., no “training” is required).