NIST Special Software 1

NIST Scoring Package Release 1.0 (SP)

Price: $90.00 PLACE ORDER 

Effective immediately, there will be a minimum $30.00 shipping charge for all international shipments of databases via Fed. Ex. Customer will be responsible for their own duties, tax, and VAT. Contact (844) 374-0183 (Toll Free) or data [at] nist.gov (data[at]nist[dot]gov) if you have questions.

The NIST Scoring Package is a reference implementation of the draft Standard Method for Evaluating the Performance of Systems Intended to Recognize Hand-printed Characters from Image Data Scanned from Forms, which has been submitted to ANSI X.3A.

This software was used to score the results from the First Census Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Systems Conference sponsored by the Bureau of the Census and hosted by NIST.

A User's Guide is provided which presents the concepts of scoring forms processing systems and character classifiers, discusses the concepts and the algorithm used for dynamic string alignment, defines the files and their formats required as input to the Scoring Package, and documents how the Scoring Package software is installed and invoked.

This software release has the following features:

• supports both form-based and character-based scoring
• applies to a wide variety of structured forms
• can be used in conjunction with NIST Special Databases (SD1, SD2, SD3, SD6, & SD7)
• supports user-defined form structures
• includes scoring examples from forms and isolated characters
• includes an extensive 66-page User's Guide

The NIST Scoring Package can be used to:

• determine whether OCR technology is economically advantageous to deploy for a specific application
• determine which OCR product is best suited for a specific application
• choose from a large variety of diverse algorithmic approaches when developing OCR systems

The NIST Scoring Package has the following attributes and requirements:

• written in the "C" programming language and UNIX shell languages
• developed to run on a UNIX system running Sun OS 4.1.1
• distributed on a 5.25 CD-ROM
• requires a CD-ROM drive with ISO-9660 format software
• utilizes 5 megabytes of magnetic disk storage upon installation and compilation

Please click here to view the PDF version of Users' Guide.

For more information please contact:
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Standard Reference Data Program
100 Bureau Dr., Stop 6410
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-6410
(844) 374-0183 (Toll Free)

The scientific contact for the data base is:
Michael Garris
Advanced Systems Division
National Institute of Standards and Technology
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8940
Building 225, Room A216
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8940 (301) 975-2928 mdg [at] nist.gov (mdg[at]nist[dot]gov)

Keywords: Census OCR Systems Conference; Error Rates; Evaluation Software; Optical Character Recognition; Performance Assessment.

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