International Business Machines Corporation

Other

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Kla Tencor Corporation

Benoit Maison

Ramesh Ambat Gopinath

Ea-Ee Jan

Brian C Wu

Geoffrey G Zweig

Dimitri Kanevsky

David Nahamoo

Sara H Basson

Michael Alan Picheny

Vaibhava Goel

Karthik Visweswariah

George Andrei Saon

Hong-Kwang Jeff Kuo

Sreeram Viswanath Balakrishnan

Stanley S Chen

Christophe Wouters

Karel Van Gils

Andy Hill

Yuging Gao

Jerome L Quinn

William J Ablondi

Scott Elliot Axelrod

Laurent Hermans

Frans Nijs

Xavier Sohy

Andrzei Sakrajda

Olivier Pierre

Matthieu Laheux

Disclosed is an improved OCR system wherein the same can be utilized for capturing and analyzing multiple images of a document to increase the efficiency and accuracy of digitizing printed texts on the document. Captured images are merged into a single set of character recognition results via a recognition method from multiple images, which include early fusion, late fusion, and hybrid fusion embodiments. The end product from each of the embodiments provides text and metadata that include recognized words. In late and hybrid fusion, words having confidence scores above a predetermined threshold are assembled together to form paragraphs to reconstruct a digital version of the document. In this way, the present invention utilizes multiple images that can be combined to aggregate information and achieve high accuracy when scanning and digitizing printed texts.

Optical character recognition system using multiple images and method of use

An apparatus for interaction of a plurality of users with an application, comprising: a plurality of pointing devices () capable of emitting a signal () (such as visible or infrared light, a laser or omnidirectional flashes), each pointing device comprising one or more triggers; a presentation device () (such as display, a wall, or any objects); and detection means () (camera, stereo camera, other) capable of detecting said signal (). The apparatus also comprises means () for detecting trigger actions by said users, and recording the identity and time of said trigger actions (), means () for enabling said pointing devices () to emit said signal () and means () for enabling said detection means () to detect said signal (), and for linking said signal detection to a specific pointing device () trigger action.

Multi-user pointing apparaus and method

An apparatus () and a method for the three dimensional inspection of saw marks () on at least one surface () of a wafer () are disclosed. At least one camera () is required to capture an image of the entire surface () of the wafer (). At least one line projector () provides a light bundle (), centered about a central beam axis (). The line projector () is arranged such that the central beam axis () is at an acute angle (&#x3b1;) with regard to the plane (P) of the wafer (). A line shifter () is positioned in the light bundle () between each line projector () and the surface () of the wafer (). A frame grabber () and an image processor () are used to synchronize and coordinate the image capture and the position of the pattern () of lines () on the front side (F) and/or the back side (B) of the wafer ().

Apparatus and method for three dimensional inspection of wafer saw marks

A user interface, and associated techniques, that permit a fast and efficient way of correcting speech recognition errors, or of diminishing their impact. The user may correct mistakes in a natural way, essentially by repeating the information that was incorrectly recognized previously. Such a mechanism closely approximates what human-to-human dialogue would be in similar circumstances. Such a system fully takes advantage of all the information provided by the user, and on its own estimates the quality of the recognition in order to determine the correct sequence of words in the fewest number of steps.

Natural error handling in speech recognition

A method of updating an application in a processing system, the processing system including a plurality of computing resource units wherein at least two of the resource units are initially allocated to a first application, and wherein the processing system has insufficient resources to simultaneously run both of the first application and a second application at full capacity, the method including de-allocating fewer than all of the resource units allocated to the first application, then allocating at least one resource unit to the second application, and then de-allocating at least one resource unit from the first application.

Update technique for speech recognition applications with uninterrupted (24X7) operation

A method includes applying at least one tag to at least one data element stored in a database the tag having at least one associated rule, utilizing the at least one associated rule to generate at least one variant of the data element, and storing the at least one variant in the database.

Natural language interaction with large databases

A method of updating an application in a processing system, the aforesaid method comprising the steps of: (a) starting operation of a first version of an application in the aforesaid processing system; (b) starting operation of a second version of the aforesaid application in the aforesaid processing system; and (c) incrementally reallocating processing system resources from the aforesaid first version of the aforesaid application to a second version of the aforesaid application, such that at most one application selected from the aforesaid first version and the aforesaid second version of the aforesaid application operates at full capacity at any time, and such that at least one of the aforesaid first version and the aforesaid second version of the aforesaid application is operating at all times.

In a speech recognition system, the combination of a log-linear model with a multitude of speech features is provided to recognize unknown speech utterances. The speech recognition system models the posterior probability of linguistic units relevant to speech recognition using a log-linear model. The posterior model captures the probability of the linguistic unit given the observed speech features and the parameters of the posterior model. The posterior model may be determined using the probability of the word sequence hypotheses given a multitude of speech features. Log-linear models are used with features derived from sparse or incomplete data. The speech features that are utilized may include asynchronous, overlapping, and statistically non-independent speech features. Not all features used in training need to appear in testing/recognition.

Speech recognition utilizing multitude of speech features

Methods and arrangements for facilitating database access in speech recognition. A plurality of possible subsequences corresponding to a database entry are ascertained, a record of such subsequences and their correspondence to database entries is created, and either or both of the following are carried out: unique signatures are ascertained via determining whether a subsequence corresponding to a given database entry does not also correspond to at least one other database entry; and/or multiple occurrences of a given subsequence are found, with corresponding database entries being grouped into a confusion set.

Automatic construction of unique signatures and confusable sets for database access

A voice processing system is provided in which sets of engines running on a plurality of servers are configured differently from one another. The sets of engines may be configured to achieve different trade-offs between performance of a task and resources required to perform the task. In the voice processing system, a task routing server is provided that assigns different sets of sub-tasks to different sets of task engines. The number of engines used to perform a task and the number of engines in each set are adjusted. By adjusting the parameters settings for the set of engines based on the type of application, the particular requirements of the application, or the nature and importance of the subtasks, for example, advantages such as improvement of resource utilization and the hardware and software costs reduction may be obtained.

Resource allocation for voice processing applications

Generally, the present invention provides the ability to present a mixed display of a transcription to a user. The mixed display is preferably organized in a hierarchical fashion. Words, syllables and phones can be placed on the same display by the present invention, and the present invention can select the appropriate symbol transcription based on the parts of speech that meet minimum confidences. Words are displayed if they meet a minimum confidence or else syllables, which make up the word, are displayed. Additionally, if a syllable does not meet a predetermined confidence, then phones, which make up the syllable, may be displayed. A transcription, in one aspect of the present invention, may also be described as a hierarchical transcription, because a unique confidence is derived that accounts for mixed word/syllable/phone data.

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Wavre, Belgium

Benoit Maison