Scan-Optics

Scan-Optics was founded in 1968 by four Connecticut men with financial backing from The Travelers Companies. Its goal of developing the brand-new and barely functioning optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Scan-Optics was one of the technology groups enabling the transition from paper to digital.

Scan-Optics developed the image dissector tube and made it commercially available, pioneered an alphanumeric handwriting recognition system, and introduced key data entry integrated with optical character recognition via a direct computer-to-computer link to accomplish image reject repair. In a 1997 study Doculabs classified Scan-Optics' intelligent character recognition (ICR) as "a significant improvement over standard ICR technology" - in tests using 3,400 forms completed from a national sample of the general population, only Scan-Optics' ICR technology yielded a field read rate accuracy of approximately 90%.[5] In recent years, Scan-Optics' developments[6] included acoustic double page detection, context edit,[7] the integration of magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) and barcode reading into the recognition system[8] and the introduction of grayscale capability in OCR.[9]