Monday, May 30, 2011

Obama bith certificate - OCR convert "H" to "X"

OCR convert "H" to "X" obama bith certificate

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is software that converts text in images to digital text. For instance if you wanted to turn the text in a fax into a word document you would put the physical paper fax into a scanner with OCR capability and the OCR software would recognise the text in the fax and convert it to a digital copy. However, since OCR software frequently makes mistakes it would be necessary to edit the resulting digital text.

A very common OCR mistake is to convert a "H" to a "X". I plaed the word "THE" 20 times on a sheet of plain paper and ran it through my OCR software. Fourteen of the words were correct and four of them read "TXE" and two of the read 'TKE".

I would conclude that the "X" in the word "THE" is a result of OCR being used to copy the image of a registrar stamp and convert it to a digital format. Obviously, a stamp that is used on hundreds of documents would not have a typo. Thus the typo in the stamp is evidence that it rally isn't an image of a stamp but rather the result of OCR software being used to create a copy of the original stamp.

Sam Sewell
http://thesteadydrip.blogspot.com/

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