Google announced a new sponsored project yesterday called the OCRopus OCR project.

"The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use. In addition, we are structuring the system in such a way that it will be easy to reuse by other researchers in the field."

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/04/announcing-ocropus-open-source-ocr.html