#Best text scanner portable#
#Best text scanner code#

In the 2000s, OCR was made available online as a service (WebOCR), in a cloud computing environment, and in mobile applications like real-time translation of foreign-language signs on a smartphone. Xerox eventually spun it off as Scansoft, which merged with Nuance Communications.

Two years later, Kurzweil sold his company to Xerox, which had an interest in further commercializing paper-to-computer text conversion. LexisNexis was one of the first customers, and bought the program to upload legal paper and news documents onto its nascent online databases. In 1978, Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the optical character recognition computer program. On January 13, 1976, the successful finished product was unveiled during a widely reported news conference headed by Kurzweil and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. This device required the invention of two enabling technologies – the CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. ) Kurzweil decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine for the blind, which would allow blind people to have a computer read text to them out loud. and continued development of omni- font OCR, which could recognize text printed in virtually any font (Kurzweil is often credited with inventing omni-font OCR, but it was in use by companies, including CompuScan, in the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1974, Ray Kurzweil started the company Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. The patent was acquired by IBM.īlind and visually impaired users In 1931, he was granted USA Patent number 1,838,389 for the invention.

#Best text scanner code#

In the late 1920s and into the 1930s, Emanuel Goldberg developed what he called a 'Statistical Machine' for searching microfilm archives using an optical code recognition system. Concurrently, Edmund Fournier d'Albe developed the Optophone, a handheld scanner that when moved across a printed page, produced tones that corresponded to specific letters or characters. In 1914, Emanuel Goldberg developed a machine that read characters and converted them into standard telegraph code. See also: Timeline of optical character recognitionĮarly optical character recognition may be traced to technologies involving telegraphy and creating reading devices for the blind. Some systems are capable of reproducing formatted output that closely approximates the original page including images, columns, and other non-textual components. Advanced systems capable of producing a high degree of recognition accuracy for most fonts are now common, and with support for a variety of digital image file format inputs. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision.Įarly versions needed to be trained with images of each character, and worked on one font at a time. Widely used as a form of data entry from printed paper data records – whether passport documents, invoices, bank statements, computerized receipts, business cards, mail, printouts of static-data, or any suitable documentation – it is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, displayed on-line, and used in machine processes such as cognitive computing, machine translation, (extracted) text-to-speech, key data and text mining. Optical character recognition or optical character reader ( OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo (for example the text on signs and billboards in a landscape photo) or from subtitle text superimposed on an image (for example: from a television broadcast).

#Best text scanner portable#

Video of the process of scanning and real-time optical character recognition (OCR) with a portable scanner