OCR for ancient Greek

• Tesseract is an ongoing Google open source project for OCR.
• The Gamera toolkit for analysing and scanning complex texts includes some experiments with polytonic Greek
• Bruce Robertson reports on some preliminary results of a survey of techniques: http://www.heml.org/RobertsonGreekOCR/
• Federico Boschetti has been experimenting with adapting/training Google's OCR engine tesseract to ancient Greek texts: http://www.himeros.eu/ (related paper)
• The commercial OCR software Anagnostis (€585) can handle ancient Greek, though apparently poorly
• ABBYY FineReader can be made to work with ancient Greek with extensive training
• Google Docs now allows you to have it do OCR on uploaded documents in a variety of languages, and you can get some results by specifying "Greek" and uploading a PDF (images seem not to work). Quality is about on the level of Google Books OCR of printed ancient Greek.

alternatives

• AccessTEI is a service for members of the TEI for manual keying of texts which can handle ancient Greek

External links

• Discussion of ancient Greek OCR software on Digital Classicist mailing list
• Deciding whether Optical Character Recognition is feasible, Simon Tanner (KDCS), 2004