[Jocr-devels] urgent OCR project idea with potential cash support

[Matt W. <mc_...@ya...>]

OCR has role to play in current US election cycle. 
There is serious concern that at least one Senatorial
Candidate (Joe Lieberman) has campaign expenditures
that *might* be fraudulent.  The data to show that it
is at minimum unusual are publicly available and filed
on standard forms but in scanned .pdf or gif images
only. (An example of the type of form I would like to
parse and scan is here
http://images.nictusa.com/showimg/14509.gif).  Given
that there are thousands of pages, the effort to
process these forms, extract the data into an
analyzable database in an unbiased fashion is all but
impossible to accomplish manually at this point.  Thus
my hope for OCR.

I would like to be able to pull out data from the form
fields and compile it into a database.  (The end
result would be to compare line level expenditures of
Senate candidates. At least one candidate has what
looks to be a very unusual pattern).  Anyone have any
recommendations? 

Any recommendations you have for using GOCR or
any other product, commercial or otherwise, would be
greatly appreciated.

I'm sure I could arrange for significant financial
support for the project if this job could be done in a
couple days. Tall order I know, but it would
definitely create giant media buzz in the US and
around the world for GOCR.

Sincerely,

Matt Williamson



 
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