OCR is becoming a buzz phrase in the industry, providing an innovative technology for the way we digitize, search, and edit documents.
What is OCR?
OCR stands for optical character recognition, the recognition of text characters by a computer , converting a scanned image into text. For those who want to digitize their documents, it’s quite a useful tool. With OCR, all material, PDF files, scanned documents, pictures taken with a digital camera, can be converted into a digital format, as well as made editable and searchable. Scanning an item does make sharing files easier, however, scanned documents are just images of the original file, and you can’t edit them or search text with those documents.
How Does OCR Technology Work?
The document is scanned and analyzed by the software, which differentiates between images and text. By studying the dark and light areas, OCR will match the text from the document to known characters, letters or numbers, converting it to a digital text. More and more organizations are utilizing OCR and allowing it to make conversion and retrieval of documents much easier. Letters and other forms of mail are sorted with OCR and many libraries use it to preserve books, newspapers and other forms of paper documents.
How Can OCR Software Help?
OCR software transfers documents to your computer and a digital format. Even documents you have handwritten! OCR makes converting and sharing documents even easier. Rather than scanning a document and being limited to searching and storing as a whole image, you can search by lines of text as well as keep the format of the original document. Not to mention, the process saves time and cost!
Our software, PSIGEN, can help with the challenge of scanning and capturing documents:
- Document scanning and import
- Optical character recognition (OCR)
- Data capture
Contact us today with any questions about OCR or how we can improve your business systems.
