New Very Large NIST OCR Database

[Patrick Grother]

                     +--------------------------+
                     | NIST Special Database 19 |
                     +--------------------------+

                Handprinted Forms and Characters Database

Special Database 19 contains NIST's entire corpus of training materials
for handprinted doucument and character recognition. It publishes
Handprinted Sample Forms from 3600 writers, 810000 character images
isolated from their forms, ground truth classifications for those images,
reference forms for further data collection, and software utilities for
image management and handling. It supersedes Special Databases 3 and 7.

        + "Final" accumulation of NIST's handprinted sample data

        + Full page HSF forms from 3600 writers

        + Separate digit, upper and lower case, and free text fields

        + over 800000 images with hand checked classifications

        + Binary images Scanned at 11.8 dots per mm ( 300 dpi )

        + Updated CCITT IV Compression Source Code

        + Database management utilities

        + The images of Special Database 19 form a superset of the
          images of two previous releases: Special Databases 3 and 7
          which are now discontinued.

The database is NIST's largest and probably final release of images
intended for handprint document processing and OCR research. The full
page images are the default input to the "NIST FORM-BASED HANDPRINT
RECOGNITION SYSTEM", a public domain release of end to end page recognition
software.

Special Database 19 is available as a 5.25 inch CD-ROM in the ISO-9660 format.
 
For sales contact:
 
Standard Reference Data
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Building 221, Room A323
Gaithersburg, MD 20899
Voice: (301) 975-2208
FAX:   (301) 926-0416
email: srdata at enh.nist.gov
 
 
For technical details contact:
 
Patrick Grother
Visual Image Processing Group
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Building 225, Room A216
Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899
Voice: (301) 975-4157
FAX:   (301) 840-1357
email: patrick at magi.ncsl.nist.gov