Character recognition in practice today and tomorrow

An outline of today's state of the art OCR technology is given with its most important approaches from single character recognition to holistic word recognition and the co-evolution of hardware technology and pattern recognition capabilities is shown. The relation between font design and the design of an omnifont recognition system is illustrated. The economic relevance of todays's OCR technology is discussed. The article concludes with reflections about future trends in the OCR field such as growing complexity of patterns and knowledge bases in OCR applications.