Russian software vendor ABBYY, a specialist in OCR (optical character recognition) software, signed an agreement with Swedish company C Technologies, manufacturer of C-Pen scanning pen. Russian company will develop an OCR system for this product, using their ABBYY FineReader Engine technology. It will be the company's first software product not aimed at conventional PCs but tightly integrated with specialized hardware. This puts severe restrictions on the product, since it should run in quite different operating environment, using limited resources, yet without sacrificing the quality of recognition.

C-Pen is a compact scanner able to input up to 3000 pages of text and store them in its memory. The data can also be transmitted to a computer via an infrared port. Built-in digital camera makes images of the text under the pen, and embedded OCR system will convert them into a plain text format. C-Pen is based on Intel StrongArm processor, running at 100 MHz, and weights as little as 100 g.

This small device requires a highly effective design for OCR system, since its size should not exceed 2 Mbytes. This is approximately ten times less than the standard version of FineReader. Nevertheless, ABBYY specialists are optimistic about solving the problem, with high quality of recognition and ability to recognize texts in 53 languages being retained.

Source: InfoArt News Agency

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