What Is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) & Why You Need It?
With the rapid advancement in the area of digital image processing and computer vision has led to the emergence of Optical Character Recognition. This technology allows you to convert different types of documents comprising of scanned paper documents, PDF files, PNG and JPEG images into a storage medium such as databases and editorial tools.
Primarily, the complete idea of transforming text from videos and images would be a conducive task to eradicate complex problems. The working role of OCR is to analyze a picture of text, handwritten document or menu of the restaurant and converts it into text in editable documents including DOCX, RTF, TXT and PDF file format.
How OCR Works?
There are certain stages of the working process in OCR, initially, the image is loaded in bitmap into dedicated devices and the most essential image features consisting of resolution and inversion are clearly detected easily. There are several factors that will have an impact on OCR results, primarily some of the images requires cleansing noisy text, skew detection and correction. Although different must be rescaled and inverted before processing purposes so they can maintain specific OCR based requirements including a several predefined ranges of colors, fonts, and background images.
Further, the next phase is to analyze the layout of pages, which is also termed as “zoning”. The major factor of this classification is that the pre-built OCR algorithm divides multiple pages into elements comprising of blocks of texts, images, tables and then breaks them in the form of words, lines and lastly characters to perform OCR analysis procedure, after the complete processing of a huge number of hypotheses, the algorithm has finally taken a decision with text illustration to get your text recognized in a manageable way.
Uses of OCR?
The use of OCR is quite beneficial in numerous use-cases of different situations. It is somehow quite beneficial in any profession or industry that comprises of:
- OCR comprises of workflows which are triggered by documentation aspects in the form of DOCX, RTF, TXT, and PDF.
- You can receive a huge amount of technical & non-technical documentation aspects that converts these documents in digital form.
- OCR helps you to search for multiple documentation in a digitalized form.
Primarily, OCR is also popular in commercial dealings often regarded as client’s products and services. Most of the banks and financial sectors enable customers to submit checks via smartphones using OCR image recognition software, which takes pictures of the consumers converts it into meaningful form and then confirmation processes are monitored and managed with OCR software product.
Certainly, the use-cases are implied in real-world applications for conversion purposes also rely on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), because they help you to translate texts from images. Further, the app converts them into meaningful form and then it enables users to extract the similar texts from the image or scanned area and then it executes the extracted text via machine learning and translation software that can be depicted into meaning form as a translated text on the output screen.
Benefits of OCR?
The uses of OCR are wide-spread in the form of real-world applications, it’s quite unsurprisingly that OCR has been used in multiple industries including banking and finance, law, IT Companies, hospital, and healthcare.
Technically, businesses can avail benefits from OCR which enables users capability to search via pressing CTRL/CMD+F, and relevant technical stuff including content management, technical documentation and UML and software process models used for configuration prospects and project management. For these reasons, most of the web development services companies used OCR for multiple activities.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, the wide range of smartphones and enormous improvements in their camera specifications, promises for mobile-based OCR always seems to be almost limited around the rapid timeframe. The latest apps including OCR has already gone ahead beyond the transition of digital documents. Hence, In the near future, the amalgamation of OCR with cutting edge areas of Big Data, AR, VR, and AI, they would possibly enhance the businesses via digital transformation with the latest technologies.
