optical character recognition

In this day and age everything has to be digitalized -- or rather, everyone wants everything to be reached easily and quickly through computers and the all powerful internet. This is all well and good, except for the fact that there are still some written or printed documents in the world. How can everyone reach those? If only there was a way to scan a book, for a example, and having its printed text automatically read by the computer. Luckily, there is.

OCR or Optical Character Recognition is the recognition of printed or written text characters by a computer. This involves "photoscanning" the text character-by-character, analyzing the scanned-in image, and then translating the character image into character codes, such as ASCII, commonly used in data processing.

In OCR processing, the scanned-in image or bitmap is analyzed for light and dark areas in order to identify each alphabetic letter or numeric digit. When a character is recognized, it is converted into an ASCII code. Special circuit boards and computer chips designed expressly for OCR are used to speed up the recognition process.
This is the technology long used by libraries and government agencies to make lengthy documents quickly available electronically, and to preserve their holdings. OCR is also used to process checks and credit card slips and sort the mail. Billions of magazines and letters are sorted every day by OCR machines, considerably speeding up mail delivery. Imagine that!

This technology is limited, however – it can recognize a wide variety of fonts, but handwriting and script fonts that mimic handwriting are still problematic. But who knows, maybe in the near future this may no longer be a problem.


source:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/73023/Optical_Character_Recognition?taxonomyId=63&pageNumber=2
http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci214132,00.html#
Accessed on August 4, 2009, 2:48pm
Pictures from:
http://www.cdac.in/html/gist/research-areas/ocr.asp
http://www.cpen.com/artikel.php?aid=63