By applying semantic analysis to images of extended passages of text, several volumes of a chess encyclopedia have been read with high accuracy. Although carefully proofread, the books were poorly printed and posed a severe challenge to conventional page-layout analysis and character-recognition methods. An experimental page-reader system performed strictly top-down layout analysis for identification of columns, lines, words, and characters. This proceeded rapidly and reliably thanks to a recently developed skew-estimation technique. Resegmentation of broken, touching, and dirty characters was handled in an efficient and integrated manner by a heuristic search operating on isolated words. By analyzing the syntax of game descriptions and applying the rules of chess, the error rate was reduced by a factor of 30 from what was achievable through shape analysis alone. Several computer vision systems integration issues suggested by this experience are discussed.
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