OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Research and Development Center Co., Ltd. and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. announced development of industry's most accurate handwritten character recognition technology that employs artificial intelligence (AI) to mimic the workings of the human brain.

Conventional handwritten character recognition attempts to identify a character based on the number and angle of its strokes. Severely misshapen characters, however, might not be recognized using this method, and increasing recognition accuracy requires the character to be "learned" in a time-consuming process. This new technology uses AI to recognize character features, in the same way a human brain does, to learn more quickly and in greater detail. This slashes character learning time to 1/17th previous levels while achieving recognition accuracy of 94.8%.

This technology came in at first place in a recent contest of handwritten Chinese character recognition, the results of which are to be officially presented at the world's largest international conference on document image processing, the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2013), opening August 25 in Washington, DC.

This technology promises to greatly improve the efficiency of data entry when digitizing handwritten text.