Friday 6 February 2009

New software for OChRe - ChemReader

The good news is that the field of Optical Chemical Recognition (OChRe) has just received a new entry, ChemReader:
J Park, GR Rosania, KA Shedden, M Nguyen, N Lyu, K Saitou. Automated extraction of chemical structure information from digital raster images. Chem. Cent. J. 2009, 3, 4.

According to the test set used (and it's not stated whether the test set was also used to train the software) the results are very good, and not just for ChemReader - OSRA is doing pretty well also:
And the bad news? Rajarshi recently discussed the phenomenon of publishing papers describing software which can neither be purchased nor obtained for free. This is also the case for ChemReader. As the software is not open source, it cannot be made available as it relies on the open source libraries GOCR and Greystoration (also used by OSRA). However, the authors are "planning that ChemReader becomes commercially available in the near future, with removal of open source parts". Doesn't that mean that the final performance of the software, as well as the algorithms used, will be different from that described in the paper?

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