Forty years of research in character and document recognition—an industrial perspective

This paper presents an overview on the last 40-years of technical advances in the field of character and document recognition. Representative developments in each decade are described. Then, key technical developments in the specific area of Kanji recognition in Japan are highlighted. The main part of the paper discusses robustness design principles, which have proven to be effective to solve complex problems in postal address recognition. Included are the hypothesis-driven principle, deferred decision/multiple-hypotheses principle, information integration principle, alternative solution principle, and perturbation principle. Finally, future prospects, the ‘long-tail’ phenomena, and promising new applications are discussed.