Mitek Systems Inc, San Diego, California is keeping Headway Technology Group Ltd of Aldershot, Hampshire as its UK distributor of the Quickstrokes line of personal computer and Sparcstation-based neural network intelligent character recognition software. The software was acquired by Mitek when it bought HNC Inc (CI No 2,350), which originally had a distribution pact with Headway for the product. The Quickstrokes product is a hardware and software system designed to read machine and handwritten forms as a way of automating data entry. Quickstrokes has a number of networks that are already trained for a variety of specific tasks when it is purchased and the user selects the one she wants, because it would be too risky to let virtual novice users train their own networks. The program is trained using 10,000 examples of each character and Headway says it has an accuracy of more than 95% on British handwriting. The neural network-based recognition algorithms are trained to handle both European and American handwritten text, which have very different styles. New training on European handwriting is also being carried out. Mitek is expecting to announce new and faster hardware options in the first quarter of next year. The core product costs from UKP20,000. Although there are users of the Quickstrokes software in the UK including ones in the mail order and financial markets, no-one that is using the neural networks seems to want to be named for competitive reasons.
