Using Consensus Sequence Voting to Correct OCR Errors

摘要

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 makinga prioriassumptions about the distribution of OCR errors (i.e., no “training” is required).