What is OCR (optical character recognition)?

character recognition (OCR) is a process of converting printed materials to text or text processing of files that can be easily edited and stored. This technology made it possible to store such materials using much less storage space than printed materials. OCR technology had a huge impact on the way the information is stored, shared and edited. Before recognizing optical characters, if someone wanted to turn a book into a text processing file, each page would have to be entered a word for a word.

OCR technology requires hardware and software. In addition, sophisticated OCR systems require this process to complete another plate of circuits on the computer itself. The optical scanner scans the text on the page and then breaks the fonts on a series of dots called bitmap. The software can read the most common fonts and distinguish where the lines begin and stop. This bitmap is then translated into the text of the computer.

While the recognition of optical characters caused enormousECH still does not always work well when recognizing a manuscript or fonts that look similar to a manuscript. In the banking industry, there are systems that use OCR technology to try to read the amounts on manually written checks to go along with the ability to read routing and account numbers.

In order to give the idea of ​​OCR strength, it can help look at an example in the real world. Imagine a police department that has all its crimes stored in large file boxes. Although the scanning of millions of pages would be an expensive and time -consuming business, the benefits are huge.

As soon as the OCR system has turned the pages into computer -readable text, the detective could, for example, search the entire history in seconds. Manual finding a particular record may not be too difficult, but imagine a detective trying to omatvatch for all crimes committed at a specifiedIt is between 8:00 and 8:30. This example is scratching the surface of the force of the search for the searchable text, and this is just one of the reasons why many companies and institutions spend millions of dollars on OCR their heritage.