ADA hereby proposes an IBM-AT based multi-functional system - CAMREAD. CAMREAD is an inexpensive real-time image processing system with the capability of high speed character recognition to solve the problem of converting printed documents into machine-readable records. Different from other commercially available expensive mono-functional reading machine, the proposed system has many unique features. First, it is a real-time image processing workstation with a variety of real-time image processing capabilities, such as real-time image arithmetic and logical processing, morphological processing, statistical processing, convolution processing, and etc. Second, it employs four video cameras instead of the slow scanners which are used by most reading machines. Besides their high speed capability for image acquisition, the major advantage of using video cameras is that non-planar page documents such as books, magazines and other printing medium can be read by this system. Third, by using real- time image processing technique, CAMREAD is expected faster than any commercially available reading machines. In Phase I, a prototype CAMREAD will be completed and 99.9% correct recognition rate with the speed of 300 characters per second for most fonts which are proportionally spaced are expected. In Phase II, omnifont non-proportionally spaced character recognition capability will be added on CAMREAD.
