10 Surprising Facts About Commercial OCR Software

by Brad Blood | September 6, 2019

Check out these 10 Interesting Facts About Commercial OCR Software You Need to Know:

1 The first commercial-grade OCR machine was installed in 1954 at Reader's Digest. It was used to integrate typewritten data into computers via punched cards. [1]

2 OCR-A was developed with American standards and OCR-B was developed because Europeans wanted more natural looking fonts. [2]

commercial ocr software3 OCR-B took five years and a dozen engineers to develop and became the ISO world standard. [3]

4 Early OCR machines read one character per minute; today 10,000+. [4]

5 Hidden Markov Models is a better OCR algorithm than Naive Bayes because it doesn't have to estimate every possible combination of features. [5]

6 The largest OCR machine is the size of a football field, and 100 of them were purchased by the United States Postal Service at a cost of $1.3B - a decade ago. Watch video below:

7 OCR has been used to interpret sheet music, it's called Optical Mark Recognition, and it doesn't really work. [7]

commercial ocr8 One of the world's first commercial OCR machines was built in an attic, and could read serial numbers on travelers' checks at a rate of 100 checks per minute. [8]

9 The height of public interest in OCR was 1986. It's been on a slow decline since. [9]

10 Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc was one of the very first OCR programs. After 50 mergers and acquisitions, it's now owned by Kofax Inc., who's owned by Thoma Bravo. [10]

10.5 The global commercial OCR software market size is expected to reach $13.38 billion by 2025. [10.5] 

Discover the Most Accurate OCR


References
[1] Optical Character Recognition Systems for Different Languages with Soft Computing
[2] Optical Character Recognition Systems for Different Languages with Soft Computing
[3] Linotype - The Big OCR Project
[4] Postwar Years: Highlights of Type
[5] Hidden Markov Model and Naive Bayes relationship
[7] Optical Music Recognition - Commercial software
[8] David H. Shepard OCR machine
[9] Interest in optical character recognition
[10] Nuance Communications
[10.5] Optical Character Recognition Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report

 

 



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