Raymond Kurzweil invented optical character recognition in 1975. Since then it has become an essential business tool. Here’s why.
Optical character recognition converts text data from image files. This saves you huge amounts of time. You can focus on more important tasks. You boost your efficiency.
You might wonder, what is optical character recognition? How can you use it? How does it work?
Read on for your optical character recognition guide.
What Is Optical Character Recognition?
Optical character recognition is a type of text recognition software. It scans PDF documents, JPEGs, and other images to extract letters, words, and sentences. You can then edit these documents fast.
Optical character recognition can read up to 1000 characters in a second. It’s super accurate too: 1 or 2 errors per 100,000 characters.
The alternative to optical character recognition is manual data input. This is tedious, time-consuming, and outdated.
Business applications for optical character recognition include:
- Extracting text from legal documents for signing
- Processing and indexing search engine text
- Enabling team editing of image text files
- Scanning and depositing cheques at banks
- Letting you archive masses of info fast
- Converting text for visually-impaired users
- Scanning license plates in law enforcement
- Extracting text data for big data projects
This list is by no means exhaustive. Advanced optical character recognition is even used to extract passport data. This speeds up border gate control.
Understanding optical character recognition can help you in any text project.
How Does OCR Work?
The optical character recognition process starts with the hardware. This could be a simple office scanner. Some optical character recognition works with camera phones for mobile work. OCR can use special circuit boards too.
Pre-Processing Stage
With scans in hand, optical character recognition gets to work. OCR pre-processes your images. This removes unwanted objects and enhances the image.
Main Stage of Optical Character Recognition
Optical character recognition changes images to monochrome. This makes text recognition faster and easier. OCR then analyzes the contrast areas, processing characters, words, and sentences.
To identify the text uses pattern recognition and feature detection. These pick out each character and word. They work by identifying line types and curves. Optical recognition software compares them to its lexical libraries.
Post-Processing and Output
Once we have our text extracted, we need to process it. Optical character recognition makes your text more accurate via automated proofreading.
Now we can output our text to an editable format, such as a word document, plain text, or structured code. Done.
Advanced Optical Character Recognition
For complicated images files, a little programming can save you time. C# code libraries like OCR Library C# are perfect for this. They give you the code you need to perform advanced optical character recognition.
Advanced optical character recognition tips the scales in complex projects.
Get Techy!
So, what is optical character recognition? We hope our guide explained all you needed to know. Its benefits give you and your team an efficient tool.
Boost accuracy, free up resources, and reduce data entry effort. Optical character recognition does all this for you.
Adding it to your tech repertoire is a wise move, especially for small teams. Focus on what’s important. Leave tedious text entry to automation.
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