Practical Adoptions of OCR Technology

The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) category includes all computer programs that enable text recognition in files saved in the form of raster graphics – for example, a photo of a book page or a scanned document.

OCR scanning does not necessarily mean expensive equipment investment. The most important thing is the software. Just scan the document and PDF OCR software will automatically recognize the characters and make a PDF document editable.

What is OCR software?

Individual programs in this category may differ in the details of operation, but the general scheme is similar in each case:

• Reads text from scanned/photographed/electronic documents,
• Converts data into digital form(such as, Word to PDF),
• Imports data into the computer’s available system.

This type of software is used in companies and institutions that need tools to digitize data – including companies, libraries, archives, museums and offices. With their help, paper documents or books can be converted into a digital database in a very short time and with high accuracy.

What is OCR technology used for?

The main function of OCR is to recognise text and convert documents into electronic equivalents. Currently, they are used to process all kinds of forms, payment orders and purchase confirmations, contracts, letters and much more. This technology is used by many entities such as:

• Banks
• Legal departments
• Commercial departments
• Accounting departments
• Educational centers

What is worth emphasizing, the OCR technology can be used in multinational and multilingual environments, such as international corporations. It can convert documents in many languages, even those that use logo graphic scripts.

In addition to the obvious use in document processing in enterprises, OCR is also used in robotization and automation processes. Eliminating the paper circulation of documents is often one of the first steps taken, for example, in the implementation of scanned PDFs.

OCR efficiency:

Can any document be read using OCR? The most important factor is whether the data is complete and true – otherwise it will be useless. The quality of the documents will affect the reading efficiency. If the delivered documents are not of good quality, the writing is not contrasting, the documents will contain handwriting or will be, for example, reversed, this will significantly affect the quality of data reading. Advanced text recognition algorithms come to the rescue,and there are many companies on the market that offer ready-made software or advanced OCR algorithms.

When deciding on such a solution, you need to make sure that the software has an interface that will allow you to deliver the document for processing and receive the processed data from OCR. However, for the effectiveness of data recognition to be appropriate.

What is an OCR scanner and how does it work?

Surely you have heard the buzzword “digitization” many times. Scanning with the use of OCR applications is a practical example of the application of digitization. OCR is the optical reading of documents. In practice, they are created by a set of techniques and software that allows you to recognize strings. In the past, it was printed text,now any scannable text, including handwritten content.

Applications using OCR are a significant support for accountants and entrepreneurs. Optical recognition of documents and the characters contained in them speeds up and facilitates work in the company.

It is worth choosing proven solutions, e.g. the OCR program in SwifDoo ensures very accurate PDF scanning document processing, and the scanned documents can be recognized by other PDF programs.

Summary

As can be seen from the given example, OCR technology has a very practical adoption in PDFs.The currently used OCR technology allows for a significant acceleration of PDF document circulation and digitization, but it will certainly not be the only application of this technology.

Technology gives us amazing possibilities and allows us to achieve effects that would be impossible for humans. OCR software are tools nowadays necessary for quick and cheap creation of digital databases based on paper media. It is possible to significantly reduce the time and costs needed to obtain the necessary information from various types of documents.