An optical character recognition arrangement

Claim 1

An arrangement for character recognition in which the characters are broken up into their characteristic shape elements comprising: a series of optical transducers for scanning the height of a character, said series of transducers is longer than the height of the characters to be scanned; means coupled to said transducers for producing a signal for each transducer which indicates the black and white elements per column scanned, and the distribution of black and white elements per column indicates the shape element; a two-dimensional shift register for storing shape elements column by column; a probe network comprising an electrical matrix representing all possible shape elements and having as many columns as said shift register; a probe register for serially coupling said shape elements to said network row by row; first detecting means coupled to said network for determining which row of the probe network delivers a strongest signal representing a most similar shape element; recognition means coupled to said detecting means for assigning all detected shape elements to relevant characters on the basis of their location in a character area, said area being organized into zones having a variable number of rows according to a predetermined criteria; means for varying the number of rows according to the height of a character including a height register coupled to said shift register, a row counter input gated from the output of said height register, and a zone counter coupled between said row counter and recognition circuit; counting means coupled to said recognition circuit for determining the character with the largest number of assigned shape elements; and second detecting means for recognizing said determined character.