Handprint recognition on the GRAFIX I:: A commercial application of heuristic programming

This paper describes a commercial hardware/software system which reads handprinted documents. The system recognizes a full upper case alphabet, all ten digits, and several special characters, intermixed, with minimal constraints imposed on the style of printing. The recognition algorithm, which incorporates a large number of heuristic methods, is described. On a test of over sixty thousand previously unseen characters produced by untrained clerks, fewer than six percent of the characters were “rejected” as unrecognizable, and only a few tenths of a percent were misrecognized.