The reason for the new typeface was its low popularity in Europe and the technological advances made in optical character recognition in the meantime. A few years later, Frutiger designed a new typeface, “OCR-B”, which replaced its predecessor. This font was highly stylized and designed to facilitate optical recognition, but still remained legible for humans. For example, the first optically machine-readable font “OCR-A” was developed in 1968 by Adrian Frutiger from Switzerland. Also in the same period, Hitachi succeeded for the first time in producing a high performance OCR machine at low cost.Īnother milestone was the progress made in standardization. Further technological advances were observed at Toshiba, who at the same time launched the first automatic letter sorting machine for postal codes. The famous and also first system of this kind was the IBM 1287, which was presented at the 1965 World Fair in New York.
However, the character set for handwritten characters was limited to numbers and a few letters and symbols. These systems were capable of recognizing normal, machine-printed characters and also had the ability to recognize handwritten characters. In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the second generation of OCR machines appeared. This meant that a large amount of work that previously had to be done by humans cloud now be taken over by the OCR devices. The OCR devices could now be trained to read only predefined sections of documents. These devices worked with so-called template matching, which made the above-mentioned automation possible. The IBM 1418 Optical Character Reader is a representative model for this generation. With the further development of the devices, the first multifont devices appeared, which could read up to ten different fonts. And since the symbols were specially designed for machine reading, the first symbols did not look very natural either. However, the first devices still had a very limited number of symbols and letters that could be read. This generation made it possible to automate the first few steps in the process of document processing. The commercial OCR systems that appeared between 19 can be described as the first generation of OCR. From that time on, the focus of development was also on the possible applications of OCR for businesses.Īn example of a punch card Commercialization and first automation It was not until the 1950s and the invention of the Optacon that the potential applications that OCR can have in the business world were recognized.
The optophone was a scanner that, when moved across a printed page, produced sounds that correspond to certain letters or characters so that they can be interpreted by a blind person. However, the first OCR devices were primarily intended for blind and visually impaired people, such as the optophone developed in 1912 by the Irish inventor Dr. Two decades later, the development of a successive image scanner by the German inventor Paul Nipkow gave the decisive impetus for today’s televisions or reading machines and thus for character recognition. Carey, an American inventor, invented the retina scanner – an image transfer system that uses a mosaic of photocells. The origins of optical character recognition (OCR) date back to 1870, when Charles R. This includes reading and categorizing what is read. Scientists have always dreamed of using machines to replicate human capabilities. From the first inventions to the latest developments, the following article is intended to give you an impression of how modern document processing has developed over the years. As you can certainly imagine, not so long ago, document capture looked quite different. Not only does it save time and money, but it can also avoid rather monotonous and tedious tasks. Because this type of technology allows us to reduce the necessary human intervention to a minimum. At Parashift, we mainly use machine learning for this purpose. Nowadays, technological developments have led to efficient methods of passing these documents on to downstream processes in a machine-readable and structured form. These documents must then be captured in corporate IT systems in some way.
fullscreen Intelligent Document Processing Capabilities.