Certifiable optical character recognition

An information medium adapted to be scanned by a machine which stores error corrected machine-represented character data from original human recognizable characters in said medium, comprising:

• a plurality of lines of original human recognizable characters machine-rendered from original machine-represented character data;
• and
• at least one non-textual machine-readable marker machine-derived when said lines are machine rendered and encoded for use by a machine for identifying errors in said scanned original human recognizable characters to permit said original machine-represented character data to be recovered.

An information medium adapted to be scanned by a machine to recover a machine representation of a spatial relationship of blocks in said medium, comprising:

• a plurality of machine-rendered blocks arranged in said medium including at least one block having image content;
• and
• at least one non-textual machine-readable marker machine-derived when said blocks are machine-rendered and encoding said spatial relationship to permit said machine representation of said spatial relationship to be recovered.

A system for permitting error-corrected machine-represented character data to be recovered from a recorded information medium adapted to be scanned by a machine, said medium containing a plurality of machine-rendered lines of human recognizable characters, and at least one non-textual machine-readable marker, said marker being machine-derived when said lines are machine-rendered and encoded for use by a machine in identifying errors in said scanned human recognizable characters, said system comprising:

• means for scanning said information medium to generate scanned character data and scanned marker data;
• and
• means for applying said scanned marker data to said scanned character data to identify errors in said scanned character data, thereby permitting said error-corrected machine-represented character data to be recovered.