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Optical Character Recognition From: To: Course: Date: Table of Contents Executive summary ______________________________________________3 Introduction ____________________________________________________4 History ________________________________________________________6 Hardware ______________________________________________________7 Software _______________________________________________________9 Conclusion ____________________________________________________11 Biography _____________________________________________________12 Executive Summary This paper covers the history of Optical Character Recognition. Followed by that is an explanation on how the hardware component works. Software is covered then going into a conclusion of the relevance of this technology to our modern day workplace as well as possible future developments. Introduction Technology has advanced with great speed and stride in the last century. It has become essential to our daily tasks and in being so, allowed us to save a great amount of time and enhanced our productivity. Not only has technology made our lives easier, it now open doors for us to help those of us whom we have not effectively helped in the past, the blind. However, those days are behind us, and technology is making yet another step, with it, we are able to help those with special needs integrate into our workplaces and allowing them the freedom they demand. This is all happening thanks to OCR. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. This term is typically used for general character recognition which includes the transformation of anything humanly readable to machine manipulatable representation . Simply put, OCR translates what we have on paper, to what a computer can understand. History of OCR The history of OCR dates back to 1809 when the first patents for reading devieces to aid the blind were granted. By 1912, Emmanuel Goldberg invented the first system to read printed characters and convert them to electrical code representations of the characters. His machine could translate typed characters into standard telegraph code. As well, the machine could read typed messages and convert them to paper tape, which would be used to transmit the message by the telegraphy. Two years later, the first handheld OCR scanner would be invented by Fournier D’Albe. Albe’s “optophone was a device made to aid the blind. It would emitt a “meaniful audio output” when moved across a printed page. Each tone produced had its individual unique character. Thus, the blind would be able to read by concentrating to the tones. Through out the years, many others machines would be realized, howver, modern OCR systems originated on Friday, April 27, 1951 in a home outside Washington, D,C. On that date, a 27 year old researcher working at the Deparment of Defence, created a machine capable of reading typewritten text, Morse code and musical notes. The inventor, David Shepard claimed that his machine, called GISMO, could even read back outloud letter by letter, and scanned documents. Shepard founded Intelligent Machines Reasearch Corporation(IMR) and recived a patent by 1953.
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