Intelligent word recognition


Intelligent Word Recognition, or IWR, is the recognition of unconstrained handwritten words. IWR recognizes entire handwritten words or phrases instead of character-by-character, like its predecessor, optical character recognition. IWR technology matches handwritten or printed words to a user-defined dictionary, significantly reducing character errors encountered in typical character-based recognition engines.
New technology on the market utilizes IWR, OCR, and ICR together, which opens many doors for the processing of documents, either constrained or unconstrained. IWR also eliminates a large percentage of the manual data entry of handwritten documents that, in the past, could only be keyed by a human, creating an automated workflow.
When cursive handwriting is in play, for each word analyzed, the system breaks down the words into a sequence of graphemes, or subparts of letters. These various curves, shapes and lines make up letters and IWR considers these various shape and groupings in order to calculate a confidence value associated with the word in question.
IWR is not meant to replace ICR and OCR engines which work well with printed data; however, IWR reduces the number of character errors associated with these engines, and it is ideal for processing real-world documents that contain mostly freeform, hard-to-recognize data, inherently unsuitable for them.