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0 pointsbloak4y ago0 comments

I've always found it somehow ironic that a human can correctly recognise printed characters even if parts of them are missing and the word is misspelt or in a language the human does not know at all, but computers have to resort to language models because an exact comparison of part of the image with other parts of the image (where the same letter is printed in the same font) for some reason is not feasible?

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Super_Jambo4y ago

Humans must be using a language model for image recognition when reading though. Otherwise things like failing to spot the the is a duplicate word wouldn't happen so often.

nephanth4y ago

Another interesting quirk of human reading is that it is pretty agnostic to the actual order of letters in a word as long as the first and last one are placed correctly

Tcepsa4y ago

I see what you did there (and I appreciate it! ^_^)

The-Bus4y ago

It took your comment for me to realize what happened

Retric4y ago

I think people use font models rather than just language models. The post office is perhaps the best example where despite a known list of addresses and intended format they still backup OCR with people.

AussieWog934y ago

> The post office is perhaps the best example where despite a known list of addresses and intended format they still backup OCR with people.

To be fair, the amount of people who write their own address incorrectly is staggering.

I'm in eCommerce and easily 70%+ of addresses have some sort of minor error in them. Around 5-10% are just plain bizarre, with things like two suburbs being included or the street name not including the Rd/Av/Dr etc.

I'd suspect this is one of those problems that seems easy in the lab but quickly degenerates when you consider the human aspect of it.

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throwawayboise4y ago

Brains do patten recognition much better than computers (albeit slower)

Andrew_nenakhov4y ago

For now.

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