OCR Basics: "Reading and Sorting Mail Automatically" 1970 US Postal Service

more at http://quickfound.net/

"Demonstrates the U.S. Postal Service's Optical Character Recognition (OCR) machines, which allow mail to be sorted automatically."

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_sorter

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

...For much of the 20th Century, mail was sorted by hand using what is called a “pigeon-hole messagebox” method. Addresses were read and manually slotted into specific compartments. While early forms of a mechanical mail sorter were developed and tested in the 1920s, the first sorting machine was put into operation in the 1950s.

To handle rapidly growing mail volumes, the United States Postal Service installed the first semiautomatic sorting machine on April 10, 1957. The Transorma Letter Sorting Machine, manufactured by the Dutch company Werkspoor and distributed in the United States by Pitney Bowes, consisted of an upper and lower section, a conveyor belt transport and a series of five sorting keyboards. Operators read the destination and keyed a sorting code. The letter was then automatically transferred to a letter tray and deposited into one of 300 chutes. The Transorma could sort 15,000 letters per hour, double the amount that the same number of clerks could do by hand.

In 1965, the Postal Service put the first high-speed optical character reader (OCR) into operation that could handle a preliminary sort automatically[citation needed]. And in 1982, the first computer-driven single-line optical character reader was employed – which reads the mailpiece destination address then prints a barcode on the envelope that could be used to automate mail sorting from start to finish...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition

Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo (for example the text on signs and billboards in a landscape photo) or from subtitle text superimposed on an image (for example from a television broadcast).

Widely used as a form of information entry from printed paper data records – whether passport documents, invoices, bank statements, computerized receipts, business cards, mail, printouts of static-data, or any suitable documentation – it is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, displayed on-line, and used in machine processes such as cognitive computing, machine translation, (extracted) text-to-speech, key data and text mining. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision.

Early versions needed to be trained with images of each character, and worked on one font at a time. Advanced systems capable of producing a high degree of recognition accuracy for most fonts are now common, and with support for a variety of digital image file format inputs. Some systems are capable of reproducing formatted output that closely approximates the original page including images, columns, and other non-textual components...