ADS Dexter 0.40

The following is an excerpt from a poster presented at the American Astronomical Societys 2000 Summer meeting in Rochester, NY.

ADS roughly 1,000,000 scanned pages contain numerous diagrams and figures for which the original data sets are lost or inaccessible. Having scans for the figures invites digitizing the data points to recover at least a part of these data.

Performing this digitization automatically is still beyond the capabilities of current OCR systems, but the computer can ease this process for a human.

This was the starting point for Dexter, a Java applet that runs in the users browsers and provides an interface for selecting the part of the page that is of interest. On that selection, coordinate axes, points and error bars can be marked and, of course, corrected. [...]

In the future, we plan to implement some recognition algorithms that would, e.g., trace a line for the user or automatically search for markers.