Google is sponsoring an artificial-intelligence research group's work to develop advanced technologies for character recognition.

The open source project, called Ocropus, has several goals, including developing a high-level, easy-to-use handwriting recognition system that can convert handwritten documents to computer text, assisting in the creation of electronic libraries, analysing historical documents and helping vision-impaired people access information. The "ocr" in Ocropus stands for optimal character recognition.

The project is headquartered at the Image Understanding and Pattern Recognition (IUPR) research group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. DFKI professor Thomas Breuel is leading the project.

Google Invests In Handwriting Recognition Technology [management.silicon.com]