Can OCR software read stencil markings on a box?

I work for the US Army and want to develop a device that will scan the stencil markings on a box. Then with software OCR the data captured on the scan. My engineers took a box with stencil markings and scanned it with an off开发者_Go百科ice scanner. They tried to use Adobe Acrobat but it didn't recognize the lettering since stencil markngs have gaps within each letter.

You can definitely do this with the Matrox Imaging Library (aka MIL). It allows you to scan in and save the character set (in your case, the stencil font), then you identify which shapes correspond to which letters (so, in effect you tell it once what this particular alphabet will look like). This character map can then be used to identify the string in any image you scan afterwards. I worked for Matrox as an intern over the summer and I know their software can handle all kinds of skews and rotations, so if a commercial solution is acceptable for you, I can vouch for this one.

Good luck!