Scan your life : integrating OCR into your personal haystack!

I built a self-serve OCR station where anybody can scan in documents at high-speed - a public yet private ATM that accepts document deposits of a wider assortment than just checks. Depending on whether you scan a business card, an article or your entire filing cabinet, CPU-intensive recognition continues after you leave the station, and you are emailed options for secure web pickup. Users of MIT's Haystack personal repositories can even do "1-click" merging of offline literary artifacts into their online lives. The paperless pipe dream may never happen, but cheap digital optics and a mundane 40-year old technology (OCR) are converging to change the game. The mindless convenience of my $6000 kiosk suggests OCR will become a regulated munition* in the coming intellectual property and privacy wars. As OCR proliferates into cheap PDA's, neither publisher nor individual may ever again rely on humanity's oldest form of copy protection: paper. (*) The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) bans technology that circumvents copyright locks.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2000

Author dc:creator

• Holt, Adam, 1971-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David R. Karger and Lynn Andrea Stein.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8562

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8562