Imagine that you want to scan a magazine article or a printed contract. You can spend hours typing everything again and fixing errors, or you can use the best optical character recognition software. What is OCR? OCR is nothing but a modern technology that allows you to convert different types of documents, PDF files, or images captured by any digital means (digital camera, smartphone camera, webcam) into editable and searchable data. There are two types of text recognition technologies: OCR and ICR. OCR serves for the recognition of printed text, while ICR helps to process handwritten text. In this article, you will discover all the features of OCR. Good reading.
How accurate is the OCR?
The accuracy of Solvio optical character recognition software is usually measured at a character level. 99% accuracy means that one character out of 100 is recognized as “uncertain”. 99.9% accuracy means that one character out of 1000 is recognized as uncertain. When OCR companies develop and optimize recognition technology, they can only measure the resulting recognition accuracy through a given set of sample images/documents with known and 100% correct text. It means that an absolute measurement is impossible in real life, as there is usually not 100% accurate data.
For English alphabets, OCR text recognition software is almost 100% accurate for high-quality documents. For languages that use complex scripts, the accuracy is lower to medium but still very high compared to other alternatives. The OCR software provides special verification tools with the original image and its recognition on the same screen. The program helps you to compare results quickly and correct errors if there are any.
How to get better OCR accuracy?
Any scanning utility allows you to change this parameter. By default, any OCR software requires a minimum resolution of 300 dpi for high recognition accuracy. The best OCR text recognition software can also process images at low resolution but with modest expectations of accuracy. In complex script texts, the quality of the image resolution becomes critical due to the high complexity of the characters used.
If the document is complex for recognition by the human eye, then the recognition results will also be poor. If the color of the document’s font is close to the background of the paper or if the background is very colorful, then the information may be lost when converting the image to black and white. It sounds curious, doesn’t it? Now you know what OCR is and what peculiarities are hidden in the development of this technology.
Discover the benefits of using OCR
Using OCR in your documents, you can perform internal searches, cut out the desired part of the content and use it in a new copy. With these features, your time is optimized, as you don’t have to read a contract for hours to find information. Not to mention that information sharing is faster, and this influences the efficiency of decision-making in the company. Suppose you received an email and need to search for some vital information in it. To do this, you need to use OCR.
