Check out these 10 Interesting Facts About Commercial OCR Software You Need to Know:
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.
OCR-A was developed with American standards and OCR-B was developed because Europeans wanted more natural looking fonts.
OCR-B took five years and a dozen engineers to develop and became the ISO world standard.
Early OCR machines read one character per minute; today 10,000+.
Hidden Markov Models is a better OCR algorithm than Naive Bayes because it doesn't have to estimate every possible combination of features.
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:
OCR has been used to interpret sheet music, it's called Optical Mark Recognition, and it doesn't really work.
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.
The height of public interest in OCR was 1986. It's been on a slow decline since.
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.
The global commercial OCR software market size is expected to reach $13.38 billion by 2025.