Working Knowledge: Character Recognition—The Write Type
By Mark Fischetti
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Electronically scan a book to import its content into a word-processing program. Save a snippet handwritten on a personal digital assistant (PDA) screen into a spreadsheet. Decipher a scrawled form or the zip code on an envelope. In all these cases, software translates typed or handwritten characters into digital text that can be edited, e-mailed, stored or used to tell a high-speed machine which direction to route a letter.
That software was originally known as optical character recognition; today the term refers just to recognizing text from a typeset page. Analyzing printed or cursive handwriting is called intelligent character recognition. Regardless of labels, the programs rely on similar algorithms to assess the features of an inkblot. The programs then compare the blot's features against mathematical models to determine which letter or number it most closely resembles.
Subscribe to Support Independent Journalism
Great science journalism requires human expertise, time, effort and creativity. And it costs money. That’s why I and the journalists here at Scientific American hope you’ll join our community.
When you subscribe, you are supporting staff and freelance journalists who are passionate about telling science stories that are true, important and compelling. Our editors and reporters are often experts in their fields, which means they understand the nuances of big discoveries and can untangle the breakthroughs from the hype. With a subscription, you are also supporting rigorous fact-checking to ensure the words we publish are precise and accurate. And you’re supporting original illustrations, graphics and photos that bring you closer to an advanced laboratory, an ice sheet in Antarctica or a space mission in orbit. You’re helping us craft other types of high-quality journalism as well: Our newsletters are carefully written, edited and curated by staffers you have or will come to know and love. Our Science Quickly podcast is based on original reporting, collaboration with editors and scientists and exacting production.
Subscriptions keep this engine running so we can continue to deliver thoughtful, rigorous and independent science journalism to you. In an era of viral misinformation, this work is crucial. If you value what we do, I hope you’ll consider joining us as a subscriber
