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What You Need to Know About the OCR Process?

What You Need to Know About the OCR Process?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a process that converts existing text from scanned images and papers into digitals files that are easy to search and edit. You may think that how does OCR process accomplish? The OCR tool simply reads the scanned pictures and simply generates a hidden text layer beneath the picture, so this is why your system can read, recognize, and search this text. 

What is the importance of OCR?

Experts depicted that around 90 percent of big enterprises will have considered robotic automation processes in some form (RPA). The increasing usage of RPA is the thing that clearly emphasizes the importance of the OCR process, which is highly capable of translating handwritten or printed text into a machine-readable compatible format. Also, you can convert image to text while maintaining the formatting by using an online OCR image to text converter. 

Businesses often receive and even manage information on paper. Invoices, legal documents, consents, forms, printed contracts and others used in business activities. However, managing and storing these paper records seems a challenging task and even consumes space, time, and effort. Fortunately, OCR tools are the easy to navigate solution for any paperless document management system. You can find OCR software capable of identifying printed text, and you can easily search by its contents. Moreover, you could make significant modifications to the existing scanned document same as you can with any text document. 

How Does OCR Work?

Let’s find how!

Document Scanner:

The very first phase in digitizing is to do Optical Character Recognition scans. Remember that the light section of the scanned images are considered as the backgrounds by the OCR programs, while dark one’s are considered as the text (word).

Preprocessing:

You can find that the OCR program cleans the photos first, this can be done by deskewing or titling the scanned documents for correcting the alignment problem that takes space while scanning. Not only that, it despeckling or removing digital image spots, and even does best for smoothing the borders of the text images, and more. 

Recognizing Text:

Once the scans are completed, they are processed by OCR tool, which swiftly recognizes the alphabetic letters or certain numeric digits from the printed text. 

Postprocessing:

The OCR process significantly makes transformation from unstructured data into searchable and editable information for further processing. 

How Does Cardscanner Assist with OCR?

Cardscanner is referred to as a pioneer in OCR-based text extraction. It always lookout for legitimate ways for helping businesses go paperless. You can find that more firms and sectors are implementing OCR automation processes to attain much with no hassle. This web-based OCR tool recognizes text in images or scanned PDF files and turn them into searchable and editable text formats. Navigate to its OCR photo to text converter with OCR to convert image to text without any formatting distraction.  

What Are the Many Kinds of OCR?

OCR usage and its application can be classified, let's take a look for better understanding:

  • Optical character recognition (OCR): it is capable for capturing the typewritten text, one glyph or character simultaneously
  • Optical Word Recognition: it is another process that captures typewritten text, one or single complete word at once. This is the well-known technology that usually included under the OCR umbrella
  • Intelligent character recognition (ICR): this process functions to identify handwriting or cursive writing by simply recognizing one glyph or character at once and it mostly depends on the machine learning
  • Intelligent word recognition (IWR): this process identities and recognizes cursive or handwritten text single word at once

What are The Advantages of OCR?

The most apparent and considerable benefits of OCR is that it makes text searches, editing, and storage pretty simple. It is the best process that generates machine-readable text that can be easily accessed and read using PDF readers or screen reader programs - it even allows individuals who are blind or prone to some visual impairments to quickly grasp what is on the screen. 

Few highlighted upsides of OCR systems are:

  • Paper document files can be saved within no time by digitizing
  • Eliminate the time that consume during human intervention
  • Full-fledged source that increase user information accessibility
  • Boost the document workflow process

Who can Benefit From OCR?

OCR is the advanced AI-based technology that assists any organization that wants to eliminate paper documents. OCR is taken into account by industries that range from banking and finance to healthcare, legal, and accounting. The below-mentioned examples of OCR applications reveals much more:

  • When it comes to medical sectors, OCR works best to acquire patient records including treatment, lab tests, and doctor notes
  • Local governments sectors can use OCR to generate searchable digital documents from decades of public records
  • Legal firms accounts OCR process to digitize years of records and cases
  • Educational institutes can handle HR (Human-Resource) documents for students and faculty members more efficiently with OCR
  • Businesses can use OCR to manage their finance as it effectively gather data from bills, invoices, and receipts