Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Posted by EvolveDesign on October 28th, 2017

When you hear the word recognition what comes in your mind first – yes- recognition means recognizing something by face, image or text. But if we put optical character in front of it, it means recognizing something technically or mechanically. For e.g. id card, passport etc. People who are unfamiliar with the term OCR are  often confused , but don’t worry by the end of reading this very simple  blog on ocr ,  you will  get an idea of what ocr is and how it works accordingly.

The questions which are often asked for OCR are as following -:

What is OCR?

How does the OCR process work?

What are the following OCR tools?

What is Optical Character Recognition?

As mentioned above, optical character recognition is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images typed, hand written or printed text into machine encoded text whether from a scanned document, a scene photo etc. It is used as a form of information entry from a printed paper data records for example passport document, invoices, bank documents etc.

How does the OCR process work?

OCR (optical character recognition) works in a systematic manner. This unique technology deals with the problem of recognizing all different kinds of characters. Both handwritten and printed characters can be recognized and converted into machine readable text.

They are different techniques used in the ocr technology:-

Pre- processing – refers to improving successful recognition of an image for e.g. character recognition like license plate.

Post – processing –refers to correcting technique that ensures high accuracy of ocr .The accuracy can be improved if the output is restricted by a lexicon That way the algorithm can fall back to list of words that are allowed to occur in the scanned document.

Few examples of where ocr software is used are -:

Identification process – passports have a machine readable zone that can be scanned. OCR can speed up the process of cross -checking people at borders. It is useful for immigration officers.

Payment Process –the international banks serve to identify bank accounts across border. OCR software is very helpful in that process.

What are the following OCR Tools?

Every software has some tools so what are the various tool which ocr software have.

The following OCR tools are -:

Tesseract

Githhub

Nuance Omni Page

Abby Fine Reader

Soda PDF

Adobe Acrobat DC

Paperport

IRIS

SDK

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