It is not unusual in this digital age to remove text from an image to make it editable. This is especially true given our reliance on paper documents, which can only be made digitally editable using OCR software.
OCR is a pattern recognition AI-based technology that identifies text inside an image and converts it into an editable digital document. OCR software can assist you if you ever need to make digital data editable, such as receipts, bills, or bank statements, which are often in picture format.
Extract Text From Scanned Documents
OCR technology helps scan a document for text signs, whether it is formed of text or graphics. It employs pattern recognition algorithms to determine if a portion of a document is an alphabet, number, or character. Once recognized, the OCR extractor either turns the picture to text on the document or extracts the text from the document to a different environment. An OCR extractor is a necessary piece of technology in a variety of fields and applications.
How Does OCR Work?
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) recognizes light and dark patterns in documents that make up letters, characters, and symbols. Unlike early OCR systems, which could only recognize a few typefaces, contemporary intelligent OCR technology can recognize various fonts in documents, handwritten notes, and cursive writings.
Users initially submit scanned pictures of their papers onto computers to employ OCR technology. The system detects sentences and line items in such papers character by character, combing through complete pages attentively. Once the OCR algorithms have read the data, they extract and turn it into editable text. Users may export their papers as PDFs, JSONs, CSVs, or Excel spreadsheets, or convert them to other file formats.
Modern OCR employs feature detection rather than pattern recognition, analyzing specific components of characters, letters, and symbols rather than finding general typefaces. For example, a rule instructs the software to recognize A as two-angled strokes with a pointy end at the top and a horizontal line crossing in between them – the program can detect A regardless of the font or style in which it is written.
Handwriting recognition is a unique feature of intelligent OCR that allows programs to read data from comb fields in documents and use touchscreen feature recognition, which allows the software to detect users writing characters line by line and recognize specific features of handwriting styles, making it easier to extract texts after the initial reads. OCR is used in everyday life to scan machine-printed texts, handwritten papers, and characters from photo-on-photo pictures.
Sophisticated OCR systems may also do layout analysis, which allows applications to scan tables, layouts, columns, and a range of data types on documents besides simple text recognition.
One key consideration is that, while OCR may achieve 95% to 99.5% data accuracy, it is far from flawless and, to some extent, requires human proofreading after automatic data extraction. Intelligent OCR (ICR) takes a new turn as AI models improve in recognizing a wide range of typefaces and handwriting styles from scanned photos, PDFs, and documents, reducing the number of human checks required as more data is fed into systems.
Some OCR systems can give users error-correction functions and the capability for translating extracted data into different languages. OCR technology has been utilized since the early 1920s, and it is critical for users to get excellent pictures of scanned documents in order for the best solutions to perform properly. This will aid the API in capturing proper formatting and speeding up the data extraction process.
Conclusion
All data extraction from scanned documents must be done manually in the absence of OCR extractors. If your data is in PDF format, you must first reproduce it on an Excel sheet before you can examine it. As you might expect, manual data input takes a long time and is prone to a variety of human mistakes. Often, top management does not have time for manual data processing, so they must pay someone or outsource the entire process. Data cannot be monitored in real-time.
The OCR extractor is a one-stop shop for these problems. A well-trained OCR extractor can extract all the essential data in seconds with minimum error.
Businesses and individual users alike demand an OCR extractor that solves these issues and allows them to extract data more quickly and accurately. The OCR scanner from Oriental Solutions document management company in India, UK, and USA, is well-trained for extracting data from any document.
Try it out for yourself today! Contact Oriental Solutions
