What is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Technology?

What is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Technology?

If you want to know what optical character recognition is then you have landed in the right place. In this post, we are going to tell you about OCR in detail. OCR is not just a concept, rather it is a complete technology that is basically used to extract text from image digitally. In the past, the only way to get a text from an image was by manually typing it down but the manual conversion process is time taking, inefficient and there is also a chance of human errors in manual conversion. This is why today people prefer using online OCR tools that can easily change photo to text.

What does OCR mean?

For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of OCR, you should know that it actually stands for optical character recognition. Optical character recognition technology is a digital solution for extracting text from an image. If you have text written on a paper that you want to save into digital formats like MS Word then you can easily change it with OCR tools. These tools can scan paper documents and extract text from image in less than seconds. The OCR programs cannot only extract text from image but they can also get a text from PDF and other scanned document formats. You can retrieve text for multiple purposes like editing or even storing it.

OCR solutions that you should know about!

There are many applications of OCR. Here you should know that you can change different kinds of image to text online with the OCR tools. These include PNG, JPG, WebP, PDF, and also TIFF formats. Usually, OCR tools are used to change images of contracts, invoices, and other business documents to editable text format. By using the modern OCR tools a business can easily:

  1. Reduce the cost which is wasted in the manual conversion of image to text. 
  2. Online image to text converter tools can easily speed up the process. It usually takes hours to extract small textual details from an image if you do it manually. You can save all this time by using online tools. OCR tools can get the job done in less than seconds which is a big pro of this tech. 
  3. OCR tools can easily help you route documents and also in processing information on the image. 
  4. You can easily store as well as protect data on an image with the help of OCR conversion tools.

Also read more tech-related articles from solusimenarik.com

How do OCR tools work?

Image to text converter tools use the OCR technology and this is because it is very accurate in terms of accuracy. Now if you are wondering how the OCR tools work then you must know that first most of the tools would scan the image and find text in it. In this process, the OCR tools would simply turn the image into a two-color version (black and white). The dark areas in the image would represent the text and the light area would be the background of the image.

Now the dark areas are then separated and the tool scans them for alphabets and numerical digits. The tool would compare one character at a time to ensure accuracy in the final result. To extract text from image the OCR tools basically use:

  • Pattern recognition; pattern recognition is used for recognizing and comparing textual data in the image.
  • The next algorithm used in these tools is feature detection. Feature detections help the image converter tools detect complete words. 

Now the characters that are recognized by the tool are converted into binary digits. The ASCII code would then be changed into text by the tool. Now you must know that this complete process takes around five to ten seconds and the tools extract text from the image. As a user of OCR tools, we would suggest you always proofread the extracted text before storing it.

Some applications of the image to text converter – OCR tools

  • You can index print material for search engines
  • It can be used for auto data entry, extraction, and search
  • It can recognize license plates of vehicles
  • It can sort letters for mail deliveries
  • It can translate text into different languages
  • It helps you convert images to text or editable Word files!
  • Read more article