What is ICR, IWR, OMR, and OCR: Complete guide with Benefits

What is ICR, IWR, OMR, and OCR: Complete guide with Benefits
4 min read

Intelligent Character Recognition is a modern form of Optical Character Recognition. It can capture information from all types of documents including documents in multiple languages. It can understand all scripts, styles, and fonts. The thing that makes it different from OCR is that it can capture data from complex handwritten and unstructured documents.

Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) Technology

Although most of the businesses are using optical character recognition OCR technology because it is easily available and cost-effective. But its efficiency is limited when it comes to complex handwritten patterns like signatures on cheques. OCR was initially designed to convert paper documents into digital form. OCR just captures the data from the document and makes a soft copy of it. Other names of ICR are Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Handwriting Recognition software.

Handwritten signatures are considered as proof of consent of a person, especially in the financial and legal sector. To identify and verify that the signature belongs to the same person who is claiming its ownership, ICR can be used. ICR can easily distinguish between authentic and fake signatures.

Cutting edge ICR is trained on thousands of data sets that increase its efficiency. Intelligent character recognition is empowered with Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning algorithms that improve the number of accurate results. The advantage of AI and ML is that they periodically improve the efficiency of ICR. AI and ML are designed for self-learning and train the software on new document types. For instance, when an ICR software experiences a new document, it is a possibility that it produces less productive results. Having AI and ML, it gets to train on this document, and when the second time it encounters that document the results will be accurate.

ICR has evolved over time, the advanced form of ICR are given below:

Intelligent Word Recognition

ICR focuses on the characters, to capture details on word, sentence, and phrase-level Intelligent Word Recognition is used. It extracts the whole word from the document. Like ICR captures the characters of the word “T”, “E”, “A” but IWR will select the whole word like “TEA”. it automatically corrects the spelling mistakes by comparing that word in the internet database and gives a fuzzy match of it according to the structure of the sentence. If a word is written in the wrong spelling like “Nawyor” it will correct it to “New York” while fetching data. The correction of words was not available in ICR and OCR software.

Optical Mark Recognition

It is quite different from the above technologies, it is used for surveys or evaluation forms. It captures marks from the paper in a pre-defined area. It is used for having the results of the survey in a short time. It searches for the marks like tick or fill-in circle and fetches that data in soft form.

Benefits of using Intelligent Character Recognition

Better Data Retrieval

As discussed earlier, ICR technology has the best results in retrieving data from complex and unstructured documents. It becomes easy for businesses to retrieve and manipulate data from digital documents. Digital documents like PDF files have better search, modification, and processing results. Before digital documents, it was nearly impossible for businesses to find a single piece of information on paper documents. Because they have to manually look in each document and cross-check the results. Documents converted in digital form through ICR can give search results in seconds.

Better Security

The paper documents are very hard to secure because of their physical presence. One can lock the documents in a room, the lock can be broken and data can be stolen. Some factors like fire and water can damage the content of documents. But when it comes to soft documents the security is much greater than in hard form and the data can never be lost until the owner deletes it.

Today cloud storage gives the advantage of accessing data from any location in seconds. Hard documents only have one access point i.e physical. The data extracted through ICR is stored in cloud storage giving it worldwide access.

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Ryan Jason 7
Technical Content Writer
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