you know it's pretty easy to take words on your computer screen and put them on
a physical sheet of paper just click print and unless you've forgotten to
fork out an extortion level amount of money for a new cartridge you'll have
fresh warm satisfying documents just a
few moments later but going in the opposite direction scanning dead tree
information into your pc is actually quite a bit trickier i mean sure flatbed
scanners aren't all that difficult to operate per se
but many of them are basically just taking a picture of the document and
saving it onto your pc meaning not only will it probably not look very crisp due
to file compression and little bits of dust in your scanner but you can't edit
a clean copy of your document in your favorite word processor because the
scanner won't recognize each individual character
fortunately there are a number of devices out there that enable optical
character recognition or ocr where each character on a page is scanned
individually so your papers are uploaded as actual text documents instead of
messy jpegs but how exactly does that
work and is one kind of optical scanner better than another well because the
whole concept of translating text into electronic signal is pretty broad there
have been lots of different implementations of ocr over the years in
fact one of the earliest electric ocr devices the optophone was invented all
the way back in 1914 this bizarre looking contraption relied
on the special behavior of selenium
which conducts electricity differently in light and darkness
as it scanned the words on a page the optophone distinguished between the dark
ink of text and lighter blank spaces
generating tones that corresponded to different letters making it possible for
blind people to read with some practice
later in 1931 a machine was developed that could convert printed text to
telegraph code one of the first technologies to translate printed
characters to electrical impulses rather than sounds but it wasn't until the
1960s and 70s that ocr began to take a
more familiar modern form with postal services using ocr to read addresses and
software that could recognize many different fonts
so back to present day when you scan a document how exactly does the software
know what it's looking at well the first step is to cut out artifacts so your ocr
program can concentrate on the text and nothing else so it attempts to remove
dust and other various graphics align the text properly and convert any colors
or shades of grey in the image to black and white only making the words
themselves easier to recognize the next step is to figure out which characters
are on the page simpler forms of ocr compare each scanned letter pixel by
pixel to a known database of fonts and decide on the closest match smarter ocr
however takes this step farther by breaking down each character down to
constituent elements like curves and corners and looking for matching
physical features and actual letters you can think of the differences between
these two approaches similarly to the difference between raster and vector
images which you can learn more about up here ocr software can also make use of a
dictionary so it won't accidentally spit out nonsense words due to inaccurate
scanning for example if your scanner sees this but it can't quite tell
whether the middle letter is an o or an a it can check its own dictionary to
decide that the word is actually dog and not dag giving ocr software situational
information can further cut down on errors such as telling it to only try to
match numbers if it's reading zip codes on an envelope
even with these tricks however ocr obviously is not perfect which you've
probably seen for yourself if you've ever used it but with greater
processing power and machine learning techniques that allow software to
recognize more subtle patterns over time ocr has become versatile enough to
recognize harder to read typefaces inconsistently printed material and even
handwriting and free ocr cloud processing services
like google drive which has a lot more machine learning capability than your
home pc for which i hope are fairly obvious reasons have made ocr more
accessible than ever no word yet though on whether google will take it a step
further and launch google interpretive dance translator
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freshbooks.comtechwiki and enter techquickie in the how did you hear
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