More and more machines are looking at us every day, picking up our licence plate when we get on the motorway, our face on the street. There's much more to it than that, which is why automatic recognition devices aren't just for surveillance or policing purposes. The story of optical recognition began a century ago with letters. Things have progressed enormously in this field. That's what we'll be looking at and discussing: what do we have at our disposal? and for what purpose?