OCR Performance Prediction Using a Bag of Allographs and Support Vector Regression

In this paper, we describe a novel and simple technique for prediction of OCR results without using any OCR. The technique uses a bag of allographs to characterize textual components. Then a support vector regression (SVR) technique is used to build a predictor based on the bag of allographs. The performance of the system is evaluated on a corpus of historical documents. The proposed technique produces correct prediction of OCR results on training and test documents within the range of standard deviation of 4.18% and 6.54% respectively. The proposed system has been designed as a tool to assist selection of corpora in libraries and specify the typical performance that can be expected on the selection.