Optical character recognition is technology that converts images of typed, handwritten or printed text, such as a scanned document or a photograph, into machine-encoded text that a computer can edit, search and store. The German-Israeli inventor Emanuel Goldberg built a machine in 1914 that read characters and converted them into telegraph code, and the Irish physicist Edmund Fournier d'Albe developed the Optophone around the same period, a handheld scanner that produced a distinct tone for each letter it detected; Goldberg later patented a Statistical Machine for optical code recognition in 1931, a patent IBM eventually acquired. The American inventor Ray Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products in 1974 to develop omni-font OCR software able to read text printed in virtually any typeface, and his company's first commercial reading machine for blind users was unveiled on 13 January 1976, with the legal research service LexisNexis becoming an early customer of the underlying scanning technology in 1978.
Facts
SignificanceConverts images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text so it can be edited, searched and stored, a common method of digitizing printed texts. 1 Sources
1. Optical character recognition, Wikipedia
History, early OCR
In 1914, Emanuel Goldberg developed a machine that read characters and converted them into standard telegraph code.
Lead section, paragraph 2
it is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, displayed online, and used in machine processes
View the SourceWikipedia, Automatic Identification and Data Capture (source)
In Group: Automatic Identification and Data Capture, Lead states AIDC includes optical character recognition (OCR) among its technologiesView the Source Reader Challenges (0)
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