OCR Technology – Paving The Way To The Digital World

The world has had a hard time converting written data into digital format when businesses shifted to the digital world. Businesses that still store information on paper are outdated and need to shift their data onto computers for easy access. 

These can be achieved through OCR solutions that provide a fast way of transferring data from hard copies into digital format. OCR software is a technological advancement that reads text from papers using algorithms and converts them. 

Although OCR technology was introduced in the 1970s by Ray Kurzweil, there are still ongoing advancements and improvements to the algorithm at the back end. 

A Detailed Overview Of OCR Solutions

Technologies are advancing day by day and therefore the need to adapt to the tech world is rising. These technologies benefit humans by making everything easier and faster such as data processing and documentation. In an outdated organization, humans have to read piles of paper and enter data manually. These lead to human errors and documents being lost, tampered or inks disappearing with the passage of time. 

Nevertheless, OCR services have made documentation smoother, smarter, and faster. It was extremely difficult to convert or edit PDF files, but with the OCR app, these files can easily be converted into editable text. Undoubtedly, OCR has provided a solution for searching a specific term in the entire text and has enabled highlighting, copying, and rewriting of uneditable content. Moreover, it has eradicated the use of hardware scanners and has replaced it with mobile OCR making the whole process much easier and faster than before. 

OCR process guide

All OCR providers work differently amongst each other solely depending on the algorithm they are built on. In spite of that, they still have some common characteristics. 

OCR solutions provide a document scanning that easily and clearly reads the text. The places where there is no text are separated from the text and recognized as characters. Then those words are grouped into sentences. The most tricky part for the OCR scanning is that it has to distinguish between different characters and then assign them to specific metadata.

Moreover, the characters are cross-examined with common fonts that are available in the back end of the library. The remaining unrecognized characters are run through advanced techniques such as when OCR software is unable to differentiate between l and I then it runs advanced scanning around the surrounding characters to understand which makes better sense. 

Artificial intelligence-based OCR solution

In order to give excellent results, AI-based OCR solutions implement various technologies such as integrated machine learning, computer visions, and NLP (Natural Langauge Processing). AI-based OCR is entirely different from normal OCR scanning because they diminish the need for human intervention to verify the authenticity of scanned documents. 

AI-based OCR solution works as explained in the following steps

1. Pre-processing: 

The process of adjusting the brightness, contrast, and distortion of the image being scanned

1. Data-extraction:

The process of detecting text-block structures and line and paragraph space

1. Post-processing:

The process of differentiating between multiple font sizes, styles, and types of documents

Furthermore, OCR solutions provide extraction of different structured documents such as ID cards, driving licenses, bills, and credit cards. OCR is designed to read all types of predefined structures. 

OCR allows extraction of data from structured, semi-structured documents and unstructured documents. Some examples of structured documents are ID cards, driving licenses, utility bills, and credit cards, as all of these have a predefined structure that can be easily detected. 

OCR services for multilingual documents 

Every country has official and non-official documents in different languages and formats. OCR is now designed to read documents in multiple languages. These are used in multiple industries such as for document verification and translating official documents after scanning them. 

Benefits Of OCR Systems

Cutting down of manual verification

Manual verification is tiring and difficult but businesses can now benefit from fast and diligent onboarding with OCR solutions. 

Economical data extraction and verification

OCR solutions have aided data extraction and verification with the use of employing manpower. These solutions cut down costs and let businesses focus on different departments.  

Faster data verification 

Businesses can verify identity documents by extracting the information from customer documents faster than before. Additionally, businesses can direct their productivity towards beneficial revenues and activities. 

Minimize human errors 

Human errors are reduced with the incorporation of artificial intelligence-based OCR technology for businesses. These capture the information of the end-users precisely while eliminating the chances of errors.

Summing It Up

Finally, optical character recognition is amongst the advancing technologies that have benefited various institutes and industries such as financial institutes, government bodies, educational sectors, and healthcare sectors.