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I have an alphabet which has not been tackled before, so when scanned, there's no way to detect the letters for recognition with OCR. I'm trying to program OCR for it, but don't have much experience in this. I'd appreciate some hints as to where to get started, and how such a system is normally implemented.

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The answers to this question could fill a bookshelf. As such, it's really too broad of a question. –  Michael Petrotta Feb 24 '12 at 3:40
@Michael Petrotta, Thanks but I have to start somewhere, so any hints to push me in the right direction would be great. I'm not expecting it to be easy, just need to understand what's involved to estimate the size of the project. –  sam Feb 24 '12 at 4:56
I suppose you have not read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition? –  tripleee Feb 24 '12 at 8:07
I don't think that first comment is even appropriate. Considering the nature of the technology and the blatantly obvious lack of publicly accessible information concerning the deeper aspects of OCR and programming - I think it's a fair question that deserves a fair answer. At the very least, an educated point in the right direction. –  Thomas Wright Jan 24 '13 at 18:19
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3 Answers

Take a look at this page--it describes the training process for an open source OCR engine.

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There are some excellent resources at google books. Likewise, if you search for Optical Character Recognition on Amazon, there are some pretty up-to-date books that look to be fairly thick and intellectually challenging :D heh btw - I'm well aware this post has some age, but you never know when some other person might stumble across this and find just what they need. And if this even has the chance of helping out, then so be it. OCR is such a strange subject, that there's not too much out there that can really really answer the deep-machine ended questions. Especially if you're going to attempt to write your own library. :P

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The free Stanford Online Machine Learning class has a great set of lessons on Photo OCR in Part XVIII.

This blog post has a brief description of the example taught in the class.

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