20-01-2012, 04:18 PM
Optical Character Recognition
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Summary
Character recognition techniques associate a symbolic identity with the image of character.
Character recognition is commonly referred to as optical character recognition (OCR),
as it deals with the recognition of optically processed characters. The modern version of
OCR appeared in the middle of the 1940’s with the development of the digital computers.
OCR machines have been commercially available since the middle of the 1950’s. Today
OCR-systems are available both as hardware devices and software packages, and a few
thousand systems are sold every week.
The Future of OCR
Through the years, the methods of character recognition has improved from quite primitive
schemes, suitable only for reading stylized printed numerals, to more complex and
sophisticated techniques for the recognition of a great variety of typeset fonts and also
handprinted characters. Below the future of OCR when it comes to both research and areas
of applications, is briefly discussed.
6.1
Future improvements
New methods for character recognition are still expected to appear, as the computer technology
develops and decreasing computational restrictions open up for new approaches.
There might for instance be a potential in performing character recognition directly on
grey level images. However, the greatest potential seems to lie within the exploitation of
existing methods, by mixing methodologies and making more use of context
Future needs
Today optical character recognition is most successful for constrained material, that is
documents produced under some control. However, in the future it seems that the need for
constrained OCR will be decreasing. The reason for this is that control of the production
process usually means that the document is produced from material already stored on a
computer.
