Tokyo, Japan – May 13th, 2024, – Morpho AI Solutions, Inc. (hereinafter “Morpho AIS”), which is responsible for the commercialization of AI within the Morpho Group, is proud to announce that it has begun supplying FROG AI-OCR, its AI-OCR software for modern books, to Nagoya University’s Disaster Mitigation Research Building, operated by the Tokai National Higher Education and Research System.
Since July 1, 2022, Morpho AIS has been providing FROG AI-OCR as a commercial software. Morpho AIS supplies it to meet the needs of digital archiving projects and compliance with reading-related barrier-free laws, backed by the Digital Garden City Initiative that is being implemented by university libraries, regional libraries, and local governments.
The Nagoya University Disaster Mitigation Research Building is home to the Disaster Management Library, a collection of books on disaster prevention and mitigation. This library is used not only by Disaster Mitigation Research Building researchers but also many members of the general public.
However, the Disaster Management Library has struggled with issues related to the usability of its book search system when searching its collection. Existing optical character recognition (OCR) software has been unable to recognize text in books that have complex layouts or which use old character forms. Instead, these books have had to be converted to text by hand, which takes a prodigious amount of time.
FROG AI-OCR, however, can be used with books with complex layouts, performing OCR on tables of content and other sections of books. This has dramatically reduced the amount of time and effort involved in manually transcribing and correcting this information. The library is now adding the text data extracted using OCR to the book search system on an ongoing basis.
In the future, Morpho AIS plans to provide a richer range of support programs (such as assistance with applications for grants-in-aid) that can assist academic institutions to perform research using FROG AI-OCR.
Our library is using FROG AI-OCR to perform text data conversion on the tables of contents of city, town, and village histories, and the tables of contents and bodies of books about the Mino-Owari Earthquake of 1891 and the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.
FROG AI-OCR has been invaluable in this process of extracting text from the city, town, and village histories, which contain reference volumes and historical volumes whose tables of content include kanji written in old character forms and kanji which are difficult to read, and from the contemporary resources regarding the historical earthquakes. In comparatively recent materials, tables of contents are often created with more of an emphasis on design, so they are sometimes recognized as being images, not text. Addressing this issue would make FROG AI-OCR even easier to use. This is why we’re using OCR based on the characteristics of individual materials.
Conventional OCR services have difficulty with scanning old character forms and old kana orthography, which are often found in modern literature, so they find text data conversion challenging. University libraries and regional libraries have many old documents that need to be scanned. FROG AI-OCR can process these documents without misreading text.
– City/town/village history table of contents
– Advertisement for a book published following the Mino-Owari Earthquake of 1891
– Table of contents of a book published following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923
・FROG AI-OCR紹介ムービー
https://frog-ai-ocr.morphoai.com/
A free trial is also available from this page.
4/28/2022
Morpho AI Solutions Developed OCR Program for National Diet Library by Using Latest AI Technologies
https://www.morphoinc.com/en/news/20220428-epr-mais_ndl
5/9/2022
Morpho AI Solutions Develops OCR for the National Diet Library to Aid the Visually Impaired
https://www.morphoinc.com/en/news/20220509-epr-mais_ndl
5/12/2023
Morpho AI Solutions Announces a Researcher Package Plan for FROG AI-OCR, AI-OCR Software for Modern Books
https://www.morphoinc.com/en/news/20241205-epr-mais_frog_aiocr
* FROG AI-OCR is used as the core engine of the National Diet Library’s NDLOCR (https://github.com/ndl-lab/ndlocr_cli).
Morpho AI Solutions is a company engaged in the commercialization of AI (Artificial Intelligence). It promotes the introduction and actual operation of cutting-edge AI technologies, including AI-OCR, in the areas of social infrastructure such as government, electric power, transportation, and manufacturing.
For more information, visit https://www.morphoai.com/ or contact contact@morphoai.com.
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