Scan-Optics LLC, founded in 1968, is an enterprise content management services company and optical character recognition (OCR) and image scanner manufacturer headquartered in Manchester, Connecticut.

Scan-Optics' records management,^[1] information, data remanence, data backup and data recovery services are supplied to government and business customers throughout North America ^[2][3] and Europe,^[4] while its industrial high-speed digital imaging and OCR SO-series scanners are being used worldwide.

History and technology

Scan-Optics was founded in 1968 by four Connecticut men with financial backing from The Travelers Companies. Its goal of developing the brand-new and barely functioning optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Scan-Optics was one of the technology groups enabling the transition from paper to digital.

Scan-Optics developed the image dissector tube and made it commercially available, pioneered an alphanumeric handwriting recognition system, and introduced key data entry integrated with optical character recognition via a direct computer-to-computer link to accomplish image reject repair. In a 1997 study Doculabs classified Scan-Optics' intelligent character recognition (ICR) as "a significant improvement over standard ICR technology" - in tests using 3,400 forms completed from a national sample of the general population, only Scan-Optics' ICR technology yielded a field read rate accuracy of approximately 90%.^[5] In recent years, Scan-Optics' developments^[6] included acoustic double page detection, context edit,^[7] the integration of magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) and barcode reading into the recognition system^[8] and the introduction of grayscale capability in OCR.^[9]

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Further reading