A Computational Model for Human and Machine Reading

The reading of text by computer without human intervention remains an elusive goal of Artificial Intelligence research. Reading is the transformation of an arbitrary page of text, that could contain a mixture of machine -printed, hand -printed, or handwritten text, from its representation as a two -dimensional image into a form understandable by a computer' such as ASCII code. The current lack of a technique with these capabilities is interesting in light of the relative ease with which people read and the many years of investigation into computer reading algorithms, the methods people use to read text, and the long history of Artificiallntelligence research into computer vision.