[AV Media Matters] OCR, The bridge between humans and computers

[<rburkel@juno.com>]

Jim Wheeler

OCR technology is said to have been born in 1951 with M. sheppard's
invention GISMO - A Robot Reader-Writer. Several companies,
including IBM and Control Data marketed OCR systems by 1967. During
the late 60s the technology underwent development, but OCR systems
were considered exotic and futuristic, being used only by government
agencies and large corporations.

OCR standards were developed. A couple of them are used for routing
and account numbers on bank checks in some countries. Character Set
for Optical Character Recognition: (OCR-A) ANSI X3.17-81 and (OCR-B)
ANSI X3.49.75

Source:
www.cedar.buffalo.edu/Publications/TechReps/OCR/ocr.html#HISTORICAL

Tom Jennings in his Web paper about character codes and the history of
ASCII states:
www.wps.com/texts/codes/

"There is a thread of research that believes that the internal
dialog of human thought is formed by language, not the reverse, and
I tend to agree with them. Our character codes certainly shape the
things we express and think electronically. Character codes are a
form of information compression, to accommodate the extreme lack of
bandwidth available in paper, ink, or the tapping armature of a
telegraph. The concept of characters and character-codes in ASCII is
utterly inseparable from our Western, Roman alphabet culture".

Comment
State-of-the-art 16mm computer output microfilm provides compression
by optically reducing human readable character sets 24 to 48 times.
Although substantially less than coded character compression,
microfilm's minimal technology dependence provides the key to
migration-free preservation of documents created in a computer.
Required upgrades due to technology changes are eliminated.

When character codes were created in the 50s and 60s, OCR was in its
infancy and read characters at the "fantastic" speed of one per
minute. The picture is very different now. Todays processing speeds
combined with OCR software allows computers to read the Roman
alphabet and Arabic numerals directly from microfilm and convert
back to processable code of the day. The need to preserve
information in coded form to facilitate future processing is
eliminated.

Another approach I call Rosetta Microfilm splits 16 or 35mm
microfilm into two tracks. The A track would contain computer
documents as character codes (binary). The B track documents would
be human readable.

Since photographic film is capable of capturing human works in any
form, as either human or machine decipherable objects, it has the
potential of becoming a modern day Rosetta Stone. Only this time
it's bridge between humans and machines instead of a bridge between
languages.

Of course from a cost perspective CD / DVD wins hands down over
film, after all the media is almost free. An article in this weeks
Economist covers DVD. Titled: Battle of the Blues It goes on to say:
As if there were not enough recordable DVD standards, two new ones,
based on the blue laser, offer as big an increase in storage as the
DVD did over the CD.

On it goes.

Russ Burkel