Have you ever been in a situation where you have to type or hand write the information of a printed document? Sometimes taking a photo of a document and have to write all the written information in a word document or sometimes with your hands? It’s a headache, isn’t it?

This is why I love writing debating about vast technological improvements and inventions. You never know what kind of technology or software is on its way to ease the way of your life and work.

Since its invention, OCR has been playing an important role in helping students, business owners, teachers, and other individuals with their different tasks.

Introduction to OCR:

A software that allows the user to scan a printed document of any handwritten, typed, or a physical text information into a digital form is known as OCR (Optical character recognition). Sounds good, right? Since its invention, OCR has been playing an important role in helping students, business owners, teachers, and other individuals with their different tasks. As you don’t have to write the document all by yourself, you can put your efforts in understanding, analyzing, and searching for anything you find in the document. OCR supports the scanning of the following documents or files:

  • A picture of any handwritten document
  • A picture of any printed document
  • PDF files

Relationship between OCR and Artificial intelligence:

A traditional OCR tool was not so effective. It lacked accuracy and speed that was quite disturbing for its users. They had to do the actual correction and writing work by themselves even after scanning the document through OCR. In those times, users could not scan documents with handwritten texts or rough text images. In recent years, artificial intelligence has played an important role in improving the overall performance, accuracy, capability, and speed of OCR. Because of such improvements, its users do not have to spend a lot of time, effort, and resources in the writing processes.

How does OCR work?

If we dive deeply to analyze the working of an OCR, we will be seeing some results and information on how does an OCR works. OCR works with a combined contribution of hardware and software. Moreover, I found four algorithms, (or you can refer to the algorithm as strategies or techniques) and all four of them require a bit deeper analysis.

Contribution of the scanner:

This step is only required if you have a printed picture of any written document. You have to scan the document with the help of a typical or traditional scanner to get a well-captured digital image of that document. The next goal is to determine the background and the text area of that image. To do so, the scanner assigns white color to the background and black color to the text area.

Recognizing the pattern:

Whenever you scan a pictured document through OCR, the recognizing pattern comes alive. The whole responsibility of this technique is to understand the pattern of the written words, characters, and even the letters. After the recognition, the software delivers the data to match the words with dictionary with the help of an Artificial intelligence system that is installed in the OCR. The sole purpose of AI is to determine the text, its formats, fonts, size, etc.

Extracting the features:

This technique is to identify the overall fonts of each letter in a single word. It determines its angles, curves, vertical and horizontal lines, etc. Take a look at the letter “A” for better explanation, what do you exactly see? Two angled vertical lines, crossed by a horizontal line in the middle. That is exactly what that feature sees. This is how it determines that the letter is “A”. Same is the case with B, the feature will see one vertical line, and two curved lines combining to make write the letter “B”.

The final process:

This process is for Artificial intelligence. AI detects mistakes in the final result of the written text. Developers of the OCR software guide the AI system to dictate and arrange the words according to the dictionary to form an error-free texted result.

Benefits of Optical Character Recognition:

Hundreds of business owners, students, teachers, and employees are using OCR to reduce their overall efforts for writing a document. Other than just time-saving, there are some benefits of using OCR. Some of them are explained below:

1.    Time-saving:

Imagine writing 10 pages of a printed document on your computer. Depending upon the average typing speed of a writer, it will surely take an hour to write that content. Not to mention some mistakes you have to deal with later. On the other hand, an OCR tool can do your one-hour work in minutes and provide you with an error-free content. After the scanning, you can invest your saved time in something else, like searching and analyzing that document.

2.    A clean office:

Those days are long gone when you have to search for a file of important paperwork in your office and you end up creating a mess. Now, you can just scan your document with the help of an OCR and save it on your smartphone or office computer. It will be much easier for you to access the files that are saved on your computer. Even if you cannot locate any file on your computer, and you always search for it by typing its name.

3.    Reduction in overall cost:

Are you fed up with paying huge salaries to your employees for writing your printed document? The answer to your solution is OCR. Different business owners have to deal with data entry projects and have to hire good writers. Not anymore, now a business owner can scan those documents by himself.

4.    Your data will be safe:

As paperwork is very likely to be damaged by any means, that is why it would be a better idea to store your documents on your computer. And how would you do that? The answer is, by scanning the documents with the help of an OCR tool.

5.    Turn your documents into an editable form:

What happens if you find a mistake in your handwritten document? How would you eliminate that error? You would have to cross that word and write the correct word above it. It will surely ruin the clean form of that document. On the other hand, scanned documents are always easier to edit and correct.

Wrap up:

As technology is always there to help out humans in numerous ways, why shouldn’t we make good use out of it? OCR technology is something that has been helping a lot of employees as well as business owners for decades. It was invented decades ago and has seen so many improvements, and we will witness some other improvements as well.