Bibliotheca Alexandrina Selects NovoVerus OCR Software to Digitize Valuable Collection of Egyptian Press Articles

ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 5, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- NovoDynamics, a leading developer of pattern recognition and analytics technologies, and Egypt's Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) today announced that NovoDynamics^® NovoVerus™ software will be used in the digitization process for more than 800,000 Egyptian newspaper clippings that have been collected since 1976 by the Centre d'Etudes et de Documentation Economiques, Juridiques et Sociales (CEDEJ — Center for Economic, Legal and Social Studies and Documentation), an affiliate of the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS — the French National Scientific Research Center). The primary objective of the collaborative endeavor between the BA and the CEDEJ is to make this rare collection accessible to the public in a searchable online archive. Once digitized, the articles can be preserved indefinitely in perfect condition, indexed for online search and made available internationally.

NovoVerus was selected for this massive digitization initiative given its comprehensive support for Middle Eastern languages and its superior optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy, especially when it comes to degraded text quality. The automated image enhancement capabilities built into NovoVerus will facilitate the processing of aging newsprint clippings, many of which are yellowed, damaged or otherwise degraded.

"The BA is well-known for its leadership in the digital handling of Arabic text, and NovoVerus has been a reliable choice when it comes to ambitious OCR undertakings, demonstrating high performance on images scanned from challenging, degraded originals with poor text quality," said Bibliotheca Alexandrina Senior Digital Production Engineer Rami K. Rouchdi.

NovoDynamics President and CEO David Rock added, "We are proud to be supporting this important international effort with our flagship product, NovoVerus. Our new release enables faster processing, increased accuracy, a significant reduction in memory usage and a host of other enhancements that combine to make NovoVerus 4.0 the industry leading global language
OCR solution."

About NovoVerus 4.0

Including support for mixed language documents, NovoVerus 4.0 handles global languages including Arabic, Persian (Farsi, Dari), Pashto, Hebrew, Urdu, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, French and English. Widely deployed in rigorous government, commercial and academic applications, NovoVerus automatically cleans and converts even the most challenging documents — including damaged originals and degraded copies — into digital text, ready for post-processing and analysis. Please visit www.NovoDynamics.com/NovoVerus for more information.

About the Bibliotheca Alexandrina

The new Library of Alexandria, Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), was inaugurated in October 2002. The Library endeavors to recapture the spirit of openness of the ancient Library, engaging global audiences through the technological innovations of the digital age. It is much more than a library of books; rather, it is a vast complex providing science, research, art, history, technology and dialogue through a single hub located on the Mediterranean shore. Ever since its inception, the BA has been dedicated to serving as a universal digital library, largely focusing on the digitization and preservation of regional and global heritage, both independently and in collaboration with international partners. The BA strives to pioneer digital concepts for the benefit of the international knowledge community. For more information, visit www.bibalex.org.  

About NovoDynamics

NovoDynamics, Inc., an In-Q-Tel portfolio company incorporated in 2001, develops intelligent information capture software and provides advanced analytics solutions that transform data into actionable insights needed to make better decisions. NovoDynamics products and solutions are used worldwide by commercial industries, governments and academia. Learn more at www.NovoDynamics.com.

SOURCE NovoDynamics