He OCRacronym for Optical Character Recognition in English, is a technology that is responsible for converting scanned documents or images containing text into fully editable digital files.
It is a term that may sound a little modern, but in reality it is not so modern, because it began to be used in the 1920s. However, it was not until the 90s of the last century when its use became popular, as a result of the evolution of personal computers and scanners, with the companies IBM and Kurzweil Computer Products as pioneers.
These firms began to use OCR in their different applications to be able to digitize old documents, read license plates from traffic control systems and to translate their printed texts in real time.
In fact, today, it can be perfectly combined with artificial intelligence, as it facilitates the process of digitization, storage, search and subsequent editing.
Not only that, OCR has an enormous capacity to process large amounts of information. This is an important advantage because it allows you to considerably optimize your workflow, especially if you work in sectors such as banking, healthcare or logistics.
How OCR technology works
Implementing OCR technology is simpler than it seems. For example, you do not have to be a technological professional nor do you have to make large investments to be able to use it in your daily life, as you can use free mobile applications, such as Google Keep, Microsoft OneNote or Adobe Scan, to use it.
Also to other paid apps or desktop software such as Adobe Acrobat or Tesseract. There are even cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon Textract or ABBYY FineReader Online that allow you to try out OCR features without the need to install programs.
Of course, for OCR to work correctly, a series of steps must be taken to convert the image of a text into digital data that you can use according to your requirements. They are the following:
Background identification and text cleanup
You must first take an image using a scanner or camera. It will basically be a set of pixels that the computer cannot actually interpret at first as text.
That’s where OCR comes in, carefully examining all the light and dark areas of the image and distinguishing between background and characters. To carry out this process, subject the image to a cleaning process to improve its readability as much as possible.
In addition, it corrects the tilt of the document and eliminates spots or unwanted edges. It also carefully validates that the text is as clear as possible so that the software can recognize it without problems.
Character recognition
Subsequently, character recognition occurs. OCR uses two methods: pattern matching and feature extraction.
Pattern matching compares each character to a database of characters that are already stored. This corroborates both the similarities that may exist in the fonts and the sizes.
Meanwhile, in feature extraction, what is sought is for the system to analyze all the strokes and shapes of each character to determine which letter or symbol they correspond to.
Text processing
Once the above is done, the text is processed and converted into a digital format.
The software has the ability to create editable files, such as PDF files. In them the text is fully accessible so that you can carry out the searches, edits and additional analyzes that you need depending on the type of work or project you are carrying out.