Enhancing Accessibility The Impact of OCR Software on the Visually Impaired
Manual data entry can be tedious, affect employees’ working efficiency, and lead to various human errors. Whether it is a government or private agency, everyone is shifting towards digitalisation from paper-based procedures. OCR ( Optical Character Recognition) is not a new concept, but it helps individuals digitise files and paper documents. With the help of the best OCR software, you can convert non-editable document formats into editable and searchable forms such as PDFs, images, etc.
What is an Optical Character Recognition Software Solution?
With the help of OCR services software, you can fetch or convert the image text into a machine-readable format. It allows businesses to automate their data capture from workflows such as invoices, receipts, purchase orders, and other business documents. This text recognition technology system is a perfect combination of hardware and software. In this process, an optical scanner is used to copy or read the text while software performs the advanced data processing.
In simple words, OCR involves examining the text of a document and translating the character into code that can be used for data processing. OCR technologies are considered powerful tools for businesses that allow enterprises to extract data from PDFs or scanned documents and convert them into machine-readable data. So, the users have the facility to edit, display, and store efficiently for further processing. In the modern business world, professionals use such excellent data recognition technology to extract data from all business documents and send them to other applications for further processing.
How are OCR Services Important for Business Perspectives?
Whether it is a small or large organisation, dealing with high-volume papers and files is common in business workflow. It may be related to invoices, receipts, bank statements, contracts, government documents, survey data, official reports, routinely received papers, etc. These documents are stored at the physical places where they may have more chance of being damaged by rodents. Moreover, these documents are not available in machine-readable formats, which makes the business process vulnerable. Integrating the best OCR software online into your existing business workflow, like accounting or ERP systems, is better.
The best OCR software is specially designed to capture data from images quickly and eliminate many errors in manual interventions. Moderndern OCR applications that use artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms automate the data capture processes.
Working Process of Optical Character Recognition Software
OCR is about the search for pattern recognition and uses artificial intelligence and computer vision systems. Optical character recognition converts physical documents into digital formats with the help of a scanner or similar hardware. Let’s discuss the process of OCR in various stages, such as:
Text Recognition
The obtained pre-processed images leverage the power of various text recognition algorithms like pattern recognition or feature recognition.
Pattern Recognition: Each character has a unique shape, and these algorithms are based on assumptions. These algorithms identify each shape through distinctive features and find the best match for each character in a database of character shapes.
Feature Recognition: These algorithms work well with non-standard fonts and hand-written characters. In addition, these avail the specific features in an image to determine what is being scanned.
Image Pre-processing
In the initial phase, this process precisely showcases the document while eliminating any unwanted constraints. The pre-processing techniques are related to the following:
- It fixes the issues related to alignment during the scanning process through tilting.
- The despeckling process involves removing spots or smoothing the edges of images. This step is based on improving the overall quality of digital images.
- The next step is removing noise from the image and cleaning up boxes and lines. After this phase, the images are converted into digital formats like black-and-white renditions and evaluated for bright vs. dark regions. The optical character recognition software analyses the scanned image and distinguishes the light areas as background and dark areas as text.
Post-Processing
The final step involves using various techniques and algorithms to boost the accuracy of the extracted data by first detecting and then fixing errors. The extracted text or data is compared against a standard vocabulary and emphasis on logical, grammatical, and contextual considerations. After completing the post-processing step, this system holds the original page structure and creates a PDF containing both the original and searchable textual image format.
Bottom Line
Using OCR services for various business processes is the latest trend that automates workflow, speeds up operations, mitigates the chances of human error, and allows users to handle bulk data processing. Various industries use unique data recognition technology, from logistics to banking, healthcare, ecommerce, and retail, to stay forefront in the competitive market using OCR solutions.
