Imense

Imense Ltd is a UK-based company that develops and licenses technology for numerous OCR (Optical Character Recognition) applications including car license plates (ANPR) and ID reading .

The founders of Imense are Dr Christopher Town and Dr David Sinclair. In their academic lives they developed the first 'Ontological Query Evaluation Language' (OQUEL) for image retrieval, which mapped a plain text user query onto a query over automatically recognized visual content in a corpus of images. Dr David Sinclair retains an active interest in computational geometry and has open sourced two efficient Delauany triangulation routines using the principle of a 'Sweep Hull'.

The technological focus of the business has evolved from general image content recognition to highly accurate specific pattern recognition required for OCR.

The research focus of Imense Ltd has evolved from automated visual ontologies to Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The Imense OCR Engine was initially developed to perform automatic license plate reading (ALPR/ ANPR ) on primitive mobile devices. The ALPR technology has evolved into a fast, efficient general OCR engine that performs well on a range of language model free OCR tasks.