Patent Document ID: 4003025
Application ID: 05643976

Base Claim:
1. An apparatus for discriminating upper and lower case alphabetic character fields appearing on the output line of an optical character recognition machine (OCR) as a series of character defining electrical signals, comprising: a read-only store having an input and an output, said store containing respective upper and lower case P.sub.U (.alpha..sub.n) and P.sub.L (.alpha..sub.n) print convention probability values therein for conflict, reject and alphabetic characters outputted by the OCR and in accordance with the equations ##EQU3## where P.sub.U (.alpha..sub.n) is representative of the probability tht said OCR recognition (.alpha..sub.n) resulted from the scan of an upper case alphabetic character; P.sub.L (.alpha..sub.n) is representative of the probability that said OCR recognition (.alpha..sub.n) resulted from the scan of a lower case alphabetic character; (U(i) is the 1-26 ith upper case alphabetic character; L(i) is the 1-26 ith lower case alphabetic character; P.sub.c [.alpha..sub.n .vertline.U(i)] is the confusion probability of U(i) being read as .alpha..sub.n ; P[U(i)] is the probability of U(i) occurring on the document scanned by said OCR in view of the language of the field of characters inscribed on the aforesaid document; P.sub.c [.alpha..sub.n .vertline.L(i)] is the confusion probability of L(i) being read as .alpha..sub.n ; and P[L(i)] is the probability of L(i) occurring on the document scanned by said OCR in view of the language of the field of characters inscribed on the aforesaid document; first circuit means connected said OCR output line to the input of said store whereby a sequence of signals indicative of a field of characters outputted by said OCR, address said store serially a character at a time, to thereby make available serially at said store output, probability values corresponding to the aforesaid serially outputted character signals; an adder having an input and an output; second circuit means connecting said store output to the input of said adder, whereby probability values corresponding to the aforesaid serially outputted character signals are added algebraically; and last means connected to the output of said adder to detect the polarity of the print convention probability value algebraic sum following the read-out by said OCR to said store of all characters within a field, to thereby designate the upper/lower case print convention of the characters within the field.

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Claim 2:
2. An apparatus according to claim 1 additionally comprising a gate-buffer for storing coded signals representative of the field of characters outputted by said OCR; control means for effecting a transfer of said signals to said gate-buffer substantially concurrently with the development of the print convention probability value algebraic sum; and means controlled by the aforesaid last means to be responsive to the polarity of the probability value algebraic sum for appending an upper or a lower case flag to the character field stored in said gate-buffer consequent upon said polarity being plus or minus.