Whoa!CR based solutions developed by VEA allies have achieved great success addressing applications at the upper end of the difficulty spectrum in the semiconductor and electronics industries. They have also been used to successfully tackle tough OCR tasks in the medical, automotive, and aerospace industries. The following saved monitor screen image shows an example of the kinds of degraded characters and conditions with which Whoa!CR can cope.
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Unfortunately since the acquisition of original VEA member MTI Vision, the developers of the MTI Reader library around which Whoa!CR solutions are built, the now "sold as is" library is only made available to existing customers … most of whom are concerned about how long that will last. Enter NeoCHARISIS. Like MTI Reader, NeoCHARISIS is exceptionally robust industrial OCR software that was initially developed to provide reliable reading of alphanumeric wafer IDs throughout semiconductor manufacturing processes but is equally suitable for use in addressing certain OCR applications at the upper end of the difficulty spectrum in several other industrial arenas.
Currently deliverable as a Texas Instruments TMS320DM64X DSP-compatible library, a C/C++ API (DLL) or ActiveX control, and soon to be available in a Microsoft .Net version, NeoCHARISIS is ideal for implementation in standalone smart camera or embedded system-based auto ID appliances, as well as applications that add OCR functionality to PC-based automation equipment, reside on host PCs that support multiple Firewire or USB2.0 camera-based read stations or provide the centralized processing for extensive automatic identification architectures composed of networked (Ethernet) cameras.
However while great at what they do, Whoa!CR and NeoCHARISIS are font specific, sensitive to scale changes, and can only be trained by their developers to read new fonts. So whenlow cost and flexibility are deemed to be more important factors than exceptional robustness, EconoCR is the industrial OCR library in the VEA arsenal for which most developers opt. Designed to handle low to medium-high difficulty applications, EconoCR is the perfect complement to Whoa!CR and NeoCHARISIS because being user trainable and accurate over a wide range of character scales, it not only effectively deals with the specific kinds of conditions that Whoa!CR and NeoCHARISIS were not designed to accommodate, but does so at a lower cost.
End users either choose to use one of the many ready to install and operate EconoCR-based systems that companies have introduced over the years or take advantage of the OCR functionality featured in multipurpose VEA vision products such as the PIATI_AIT or SmallFrEYE_PC.
