A configurable toolkit approach to handwritten forms recognition

Describes a software architecture for configuring and integrating a toolkit of standard OCR components with user-specified form-specific contextual knowledge. The authors illustrate the use of the toolkit by describing two different handwritten form applications, a DSS-P14 tax form and an insurance proposal form. They show the architecture of the overall system, the components required to build it, and present initial results obtained after evaluating the performance of the system using representative forms databases.