Scan your life : integrating OCR into your personal haystack!

Abstract

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.