Patent Document ID: 4589142
Application ID: 06566636
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of processing electric image data for recognizing unknown characters of a known character set based upon the frequency of occurrence of said characters, said method comprising the steps of: converting the information representing the unknown characters into electric image data; storing the image data of unknown characters; segregating into at least two independent and discrete sets discriminatory logic tests for recognizing the stored image data, the first set of logic tests for recognizing the data representing a first subset of the known character set, the first subset being characters having the highest frequency of occurrence and containing less than all of the characters of the complete character set, and the second set of logic tests for recognizing a second subset of the known character set, the second subset being characters having a lower frequency of occurrence than said first subset and containing at least some characters not in the first subset of characters; applying the first set of discriminatory logic tests to the stored image data for recognizing only the image data that belongs to the first subset of characters; and sequentially applying the second set of discriminatory logic tests to the image data not recognized by the application of the first set of discriminatory logic tests, the second set of logic tests being applied independently of the first set of logic tests for recognizing only the image data that belongs to the second subset of characters.