Research and development for OCR technologies : Special issue on recent recognition technologies

NEC's various OCR technologies are classified into yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's technology. Isolated character recognition is now yesterday's technology, when OCRs were developed for dispatch and delivery sorting and data entry for business forms. Boxless character recognition is positioned as today's technology when OCRs were developed for carrier sequence sorting and boxless postal code recognition. Format-free character recognition will be tomorrow's technology. NEC has been developing OCR technologies for many languages.