Optical Character Recognition on a Grid Infrastructure

The current capacity to translate paper documents quickly and accurately into machine readable form using optical character recognition technology augments the opportunities in document searching and storing, as well as the automated document processing. A fast response in translating large collections of image-based electronic documents into structured electronic documents is still a problem. The availability of a large number of processing units in Grid environments and of free optical character recognition tools can be exploited to produce a fast translation. Following this idea, several experiments concerning optical character recognition were performed on a Grid infrastructure and their results are reported in this paper. These results are encouraging further developments of systems for document image analysis using Grid technologies.