Evaluation of an interactive tool for handwritten form description

A highly time-consuming activity in many areas of commerce and business is the manual entry into computer of data handwritten on forms. All forms in widespread use contain discrete fields where specific information can be entered. Automatic recognition of these forms could be achieved using existing state-of-the-art OCR algorithms for numerals, alphabetic characters, cursive words, signatures and mark sensing if they could be rapidly configured along with any inter-relationships and dependencies for different forms. This paper describes an initial implementation of an interactive graphical tool to allow the handwritten fields of a form and their inter-relationships to be described and defined for automatic linking with appropriate OCR algorithms. Results indicate that the main requirement is for the operator to have a full understanding of the handwritten form and an ability to describe its contents