Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a method that transforms an image of text into a machine-readable text format. So if you scan a form or receipt, your computer will save the scan as an image file. Using a text editor you cannot edit, search, or count the words in the image file. However, with an OCR engine, you can transform the image into a text document with its contents as text data.
OCR SDK offers special character recognition, PDF conversion, and data capture features, allowing it to access information on screenshots or photographs and turn scans into readable PDF, Word, or Excel documents.
What Do We Know About OCR SDK?
The OCR Software Development Kit (OCR SDK) streamlines application development by encapsulating the RESTful APIs offered by OCR. To use OCR, you can directly call the API functions offered by OCR SDKs.
Why Is OCR Important?
The majority of corporate workflows include information gathering from print media. Business processes include printed contracts, scanned legal documents, invoicing, and paper forms. It takes a lot of time, space, and effort to store and manage these massive amounts of paper. However, managing documents without paper is the way to go. Scanning paper documents into images presents difficulties. The method calls for physical intervention and is laborious and slow.
Additionally, digitizing this document material produces graphic files that conceal the text. Software for word processing cannot interpret text in photos the same way it does text documents.
By transforming text photos into text data that other business tools can evaluate, OCR technology finds a solution to the issue. The data can perform analytics, declutter operations, automate procedures, and boost efficiency.
OCR SDK gives your app top-notch text recognition, PDF conversion, and data acquisition capabilities. It can turn scans into searchable PDF, Word, or Excel documents and gain access to information on images or screenshots. Leading producers of scanners and MFPs, ECM systems, document imaging and capture services, RPA solutions, and other products rely on OCR SDK.
How Can OCR Engines Be Used?
We are transitioning from a world where all documents are physical to one where they may all be digital in the future. As you know, physical and electronic documents coexist in this stage of transition. Therefore, it’s critical to have technology like OCR that enable conversion back and forth.
OCR engines benefit many different things, including document recovery, data entry, and accessibility. The majority of OCR programs employ scanned papers. However, occasionally, photographs are also used. OCR engine is a crucial time saver because, in many instances, retyping the document is the only other option.
What Are The Applications Of OCR?
Following are a few applications for OCR:
- Recovering editable text files from faxes and other scanned documents
- Sorting forms into categories based on a rough interpretation of handwritten contents
- Converting book scans into searchable, editable eBooks
- Using screenshots to search for and change text
- Automated text-to-speech book reading for people with visual impairments
Although these are only a few applications for OCR, they demonstrate the technology’s adaptability in a wide range of industries. Because almost every company employee relies heavily on documents daily, business usage is a significant consideration in developing OCR systems.
Read: Should you be using OCR for documents?
What Are The Business Applications Of An OCR Engine?
We use OCR typically in business settings for data input and categorization. Forms sent or faxed in are just two examples of the printed paperwork many organizations receive. In other instances, specific papers might only be available in textual forms, such as published manuals or documents whose original files have long since vanished.
Additionally, these documents must be processed at a significantly higher cost than digital documents, because they must be read and manually categorized or recorded data.
OCR SDK eliminates the manual procedure, leaving simply the document scanning. So after you process a document through OCR, the data is available for automatic access, and staff members can modify and search the data. Post offices, libraries, and all types of offices use OCR.
Read: What are the top 5 OCR APIs in 2022?
What Are Essential Features In An OCR Interface?
Can I Get Accurate Font Identification and Recognition?
Accuracy is vital for OCR. The recognition is highly accurate in contemporary OCR tools. Human edits are not necessary with better recognition, and you can use the data directly to produce documents. Accurate recognition lessens the need for manual labor.
Font identification is crucial, depending on how we use the data. The same font should be utilized when producing PDFs or Word documents to keep a natural appearance identical to the original.
OCR-processed documents have a very professional appearance, especially when it detects and uses the same font.
Does It Provide Flexible Support For And Trainability In Languages?
Current OCR has excellent accuracy and supports a wide range of languages, text sizes, fonts, and handwriting styles. Tesseract OCR engine can support over 40 languages and dialects, but there are still many dialects and scripts you cannot convert.
An OCR engine must be easy to train and expandable, so that contributors and developers may quickly add to the engine’s knowledge base. OCR can better recognize the languages and scripts worldwide thanks to dispersed contributions.
Are There Several Input File Types Supported?
OCR input can originate from various places, such as scans, web pictures, and photos. These various sources typically employ various image formats and compression techniques. OCR software should support all pertinent image files, such as TIFF images (popular for scans) of different compression formats, such as the fax4 format used for black-and-white, to support all acceptable media.
You can use multiple formats for online photos, such as PNG, GIF, and JPEG. To save time and money on format conversion, OCR must handle various input formats.
Does It Offer Simple Page Settings And Controls?
Page control is one of the common OCR engine issues. Since many original documents have several pages, the OCR engine must analyze those pages correctly and provide the output in a way that preserves the arrangement of the original pages.
With TIFF format, you can enter several pages at once. Intelligent OCR engines will read it page by page, with the capability to read only particular pages if needed. Such multi-paged documents are the best output in the PDF format, and a decent engine should output the proper text to the correct pages in a PDF document.
Read: Top 5 use cases for an OCR API
What Are The Key Takeaways?
Various industry sectors employ OCR technology to scan, save, process, and share documents. So, to archive client-related documents and improve accessibility to digital content, banks use data capture and retrieval using OCR algorithms.
As a result, when reviewing loan applications, fraud in papers and instances of forgery are found utilizing signature identification and OCR validation.
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Fareha is an experienced writer specializing in content and blog posts. With a passion for storytelling, she crafts engaging and informative pieces. Her expertise lies in writing technology-related content that drives results and connects with diverse audiences.
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