QuickStudy: Optical Character Recognition

By Sami Lais

July 29, 2002 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Suppose you wanted to digitize the novel Moby Dick overnight. You could stay up all night typing and still not finish. Or you could use a high-end scanner and in minutes scan all of author Herman Melville's works into a computer using optical character recognition (OCR) technology.

This is the technology long used by libraries and government agencies to make lengthy documents quickly available electronically. Advances in OCR technology have spurred its increasing use by enterprises.

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For many document-input tasks, OCR is the most cost-effective and speedy method available. And each year, the technology frees acres of storage space once given over to file cabinets and boxes full of paper documents.

Before OCR can be used, the source material must be scanned using an optical scanner (and sometimes a specialized circuit board in the PC) to read in the page as a bitmap (a pattern of dots). Software to recognize the images is also required.

The OCR software then processes these scans to differentiate between images and text and determine what letters are represented in the light and dark areas.

Older OCR systems match these images against stored bitmaps based on specific fonts. The hit-or-miss results of such pattern-recognition systems helped establish OCR's reputation for inaccuracy.

Today's OCR engines add the multiple algorithms of neural network technology to analyze the stroke edge, the line of discontinuity between the text characters, and the background. Allowing for irregularities of printed ink on paper, each algorithm averages the light and dark along the side of a stroke, matches it to known characters and makes a best guess as to which character it is. The OCR software then averages or polls the results from all the algorithms to obtain a single reading.

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