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OCR AND NON-LINEAR LEGEND ORIENTATIONSRich Hartzog writes: Dr. Greg Brunk, author of several books on counterstamped coins, brought up an interesting question. Are there any OCR programs that will transcribe inscriptions from struck tokens or medals? While I suspect there might be a program that does text in lines, exonumia generally has text both around the edge and in lines. I suspect that would be confusing for OCR programs. Does anyone have any experience with OCR on exonumia?
This has been a topic I've been muddling over for years. I've always thought Optical Character Recognition (OCR) might be more doable with paper money, which tends to have its text in straight lines. If a tool existed to handle curved text I think we would have heard about it by now. But who knows? - there may be some proprietary commercial tool or something sitting in a University lab that would do the trick one day. I understand the Evernote system does at great job at OCR'ing all kinds of text, but don't know how well it does with different orientations.
As an example of the complexity of the problem, consider the question from two weeks ago about the different ways text can be oriented on coins. With this much variation, this problem will be a tough nut to crack. -Editor Bruce Smith had asked: When a coin or medal has an inscription running in the border or near the edge of the flan, the bottoms of all the letters may point inward, OR they may point outward, OR the top inscription may have the letters pointing inward and the bottom inscription will have the letters pointing outward. Is there a term for these different orientations?
We never got an answer, and E-Sylum readers are hard to stump.
Anyone...? Maybe it's time to invent proper terms. A bellybutton is either an innie or an outie. Maybe those could be the shorthand terms for non-linear (not in a straight line) legend orientations, such as inner-, outer- and mixed-orientation text legends. Any thoughts or suggestions? Below are reference images of coins with inner- and outer- orientations from the earlier article.
-Editor
Inner- (left) and Outer-orientation (right)
To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
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