Project Reading 4: Historical review of OCR research and development

Citation

Mori, Shunji, Ching Y. Suen, and Kazuhiko Yamamoto. "Historical review of OCR research and development." Proceedings of the IEEE 80.7 (1992): 1029-1058.

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Summary

This paper is a review paper targeted specifically to OCR (Optical Character Recognition). OCR is a branch in character recognition where the input character which might be in the form of stroke points is first converted into an image to perform recognition. The paper discusses the research and development in the OCR field and what are the commercial uses of such techniques. 

Discussion

First generation Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems can be dated back to 1930's. It was only a dream at that time till the advent of computers in the 1950's. The main research started in 1960's and started with template matching approach. The second generation applied structural analytical approach. The third generation of OCR brought a lot of commercial application of the academic research particularly in zip code recognition in postal services. As the time proceeded the R&D of OCR moved towards word recognition using contextual knowledge such as addresses and names. In such development postal address name reading machines came into trend. The history tells us that OCR technology has been researched over a long time. Lack of computing resources produced a major hindrance in testing many techniques but the situation improved with the advent of fast processors and computers.