A FEASIBILITY STUDY ON DISTRIBUTED COOPERATIVE OCR SYSTEMS USING WeOCR.

Collaboration of the network and optical character recognition (OCR) has a great potential to extend the applications of OCR and to open up new vistas in some future services using OCR. We presented the basic ideas of synergetic OCR system in 2004, and developed a platform called WeOCR to realize the web-based OCR services. The number of accesses has soared since the experimental servers were put into service in 2005. This paper provides an overview of the current WeOCR system, shows some updated statistics, and describes the knowledge obtained through a feasibility study on the web-based OCR system using WeOCR. The unique survey conveys some useful hints for future development of network-oriented OCRs, not limited to WeOCR, and potential OCR applications in the Grid/Cloud Computing era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]