Every business and organization has documents that need to be stored, shared, and accessed frequently. Whether you are an individual or a small firm or a global corporation, you probably deal with similar types of documents each day. That’s why it’s important to have an easy way to find relevant documents at any time. You can do this by using optical character recognition (OCR) platforms as part of your document scanning process. OCR is an automated data extraction technology that allows users to quickly and accurately extract text from scanned documents, images, and other sources and save it into digital files.
What is Optical Character Recognition?
Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of converting images (or any visual information) into machine-readable text. In other words, it is the technology that can recognize printed text in images/PDFs and convert it into plain text. The OCR platforms such as AlgoDocs you can scan printed text, images, handwritten documents, signs, and more, and the platform will recognize the text and convert it into a digital file. OCR is often used as part of a document scanning process, in which you create digital copies of paper documents.
How Does Optical Character Recognition Work?
When you scan a document using OCR technology, the scanner reads and converts it into a digital file. The scanner looks for certain visual elements that it can then use to identify the document, such as lines, boxes, and text. Then OCR breaks the document into smaller, more manageable pieces and analyzes those smaller parts to identify the text within. Once the OCR has identified the text, it will convert the scanned text into a digital file that can be used on your computer. OCR allows you to edit the text. This can be a quick and easy way to correct typos and other mistakes in your scanned images and documents.
Optical character recognition is the automated process of recognizing and extracting text in images/PDFs/scanned files.
Why Is Optical Character Recognition Important?
There are many benefits to using OCR platforms such as AlgoDocs, including improving productivity, lowering costs, and better data management practices.
- Improved productivity - With AlgoDocs, you can extract data from large numbers of documents quickly and easily. This will help you stay more productive, especially if you are dealing with large amounts of paper.
- Lower costs - Extracting data from documents and images and then storing them electronically can significantly lower your storage costs. AlgoDocs can also help you organize and find those documents easily, which will help you avoid misplacing or losing important data and documents.
- Better data management practices - If you are using a paper-based system, you will have to physically store and organize those documents in a way that makes it easy to find the ones you need. This can take time and can lead to misplacing important documents. - With an OCR platform such as AlgoDocs, you can easily find the documents you need. This will help you to manage your data better, which will help you work more efficiently as well.
What Are the Drawbacks of OCR?
OCR scanning can be a helpful way to digitize your documents, but it’s important to know that it isn’t perfect. - OCR isn’t 100% accurate - Sometimes the OCR will make a mistake, and you will have to manually edit the document.
However, thanks to the advanced AI-powered functionality developed and integrated by AlgoDocs, it has the ability to efficiently extract data even from low-quality images with as low dpi as 75 (see Figures 1 and 2). Also, AlgoDocs allows us to easily extract tables and records. You can check the Video Tutorials, which demonstrate how to easily use all functionalities of AlgoDocs.
Figure1. Sample of low-quality (black & white) scanned image processed by AlgoDocs.
Figure2. The extracted table using AlgoDocs.
Bottom line
Optical character recognition in general and platforms such as AlgoDocs make it easier and faster to extract tables, text, and handwriting from documents, images, and other sources and turn them into digital files. You can then use these digital files to store and organize your information digitally and more efficiently. Using AlgoDocs as part of your document scanning process can help you stay more productive, lower your storage costs, and better manage your data.
You can try AlgoDocs free subscription plan, it is forever free with 50 pages per month. You may check AlgoDocs pricing for paid subscriptions based on your document processing requirements.
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