I found an interesting resource on OCR called OCRWizard. Check it out and let me know what you think. The articles seem well written and address most common OCR-related questions. The URL is www.ocrwizard.com.
30
Jun 09
OCR Reader
It has become extremely difficult to find out the difference between an original document and its copy, as sophisticated color printers and copiers have become extremely abundant. The risk of fraud has hence increased by high quality copies of various documents such as tickets, vouchers and checks which are often mistaken for originals. Optical character recognition (OCR) and magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) technologies are used by travel industry, banks, utility companies, shops and many other business organizations to prevent fraud. These two technologies are used to prevent fraud in various application for validation purpose such as check validation machines and sorters, GIRO and voucher eaders, stock control, utility bill validation, ticket number readers, airline check in and passport and travel document readers.
Optical character recognition (OCR) is a process by which an image of text like scanned check and utility bill are converted into computer editable text. The text in an image cannot be edited as the letters are made up of pixels or tiny dots which combine together to form a picture of a text. The software analyzes an image and thereby converts the character pictures into text that is editable based on the pattern the pixels follow in the image. After OCR the converted text can be exported and used with a variety of page layout, word processing and spread sheet applications.
The OCR readers form one of the most versatile data entry tools available in the modern day world. Payment processing delays can be avoided by the use of OCR readers. OCR readers form a low cost alternative to the traditional keyboard data entry. Data entry errors are also minimized by the use of OCR readers. The design challenges include the fact that requirements of companies considering OCR reader such as field upgrades, font capability, networking capabilities, power consumption and data storage must be evaluated carefully. The company should decide whether the system is intended to be networked or should work as stand alone. Low power requirements are essential in a stand alone environment. The customers should also decide whether the reader should be directly operated or should be operated by a host.
08
Apr 09
Best OCR
Optical character recognition, abbreviated as OCR, is the conversion of images, handwritten or printed text into machine readable data. The OCR helps a lot in converting paper work to digital format. It is considered to be the best solution for creating a paperless office environment. But not all OCRs offer the best accurate solution. So we have to consider all the options before going for the best OCR that would cater our needs.
The OCR employs pattern recognition, machine vision and artificial intelligence. The best OCR must make best use of the three factors it is depended on. It should have a high degree of accuracy in recognition of a wide variety of fonts. The best OCR should be able to reproduce the original image or text with minimum percentage of error. A good OCR must also provide you with options to save the output in different formats such as , PDF, HTML document, word document etc. You can not only edit in such documents but also search for texts in it. Some of theimportant features that distinguish the OCR are accuracy in character recognition, support for different languages, user interface and support for searchable PDF output. These have to be considered before choosing the OCR software.
There are quite a few things that you can do to get the best OCR result. They are,
• Start with a good original : Take care that the paper is not wrinkled and there are no blotches in the paper
• Make the scan as best as you can: Ensure that you use a decent scanner so that the image is not skewed.
Proof read the finished output: How much ever accurate the program is, proof read the OCR output.
It is a general belief that we can get the best OCR result if we grayscale the OCR input. It is said that gray scaling the input data enhances the character recognition and provides a cleaner background in the final output. Using some graphics applications like Paintshop Pro can also result in better OCRing.
08
Apr 09
OCR Download
OCR is a software by means of which data is scanned from a hard copy and made into a soft copy that can be saved in a computer and also, by this means, the copy of the file will remain forever, unless deleted from the storage. OCR is a software by means of which a sensor is used so that the sensed character is matched to the database and a respective signal is sent and a replica of the sensed character is made in the soft copy. The advanced version of OCR is OMR which is optical mark recognition which reads marks like tick boxes and stores the appropriate data too. It is mainly used in data entry and other related jobs where loads of data must be keyed in to form a database.
OCR downloads are available as freeware and also as paid software in many places. There are open source softwares of OCR too. These freeware or software is mainly used for user interface. They help the users in scanning of data into the system. The software makes the job of people who enter these data into the database very easy.
Many OCR downloads are used so that the accuracy of scanning and clarity of the scanned image is more. It also makes the work of scanning easier and there are some OCR downloads in which indexing and sorting is done so that the scanned file is sorted directly into the required folder and hence, it becomes easily accessible. Custom dictionaries and other superior character recognition techniques are integrated in the OCR downloads and hence, it is not only easy to use, but also more efficient.
There are other OCR downloads which converts the hard copy into a searchable PDF or TIFF file so that when searching is done, it becomes a very easy process and PDF is a permanent format and edition of data can be done in a complex manner only and hence, the data stored in it will not be altered when being handled.
08
Apr 09
OCR
Optical character recognition, abbreviated as OCR is nothing but the electronic conversion of information available in a printed document into a language that is easily understood by the computer.OCR uses both optical and digital techniques. Optical techniques include use of mirrors, lenses whilst digital techniques make use of scanner and computer algorithms. Now-a-days OCR is implementing Digital Image Processing (dip) as well.
All OCR systems include a scanner for reading the text and software for resolving the pictures. They also contain a special software package to recognize and read the characters. The scanned image (bitmap) is checked for light and dark areas to identify each alphabetic letter and numeric digit. Simultaneous conversion into ASCII is performed.OCR produces best results with clear documents and standard font types. None of the OCR software is 100% precise. The quality of the original plays a very important role in determining its accuracy. And for this purpose, the scanner used should also be kept in mind. The quality of the light arrays will affect the results of the OCR .OCR results vary depending on the value of the text.
Performing OCR in Microsoft Office 2007 is very simple. First save the image with the text in any of the standard formats. After that, insert the image into a new OneNote document, right click it and select ‘Copy Text from Image’. Then just paste this in another new document. It’s as simple as that!
Today, OCR can understand a wide variety of fonts but still have trouble with fonts resembling the human handwriting. Most ancient scripts are found to be cursive in nature and hence are really hard to be deciphered by the machine. Languages that have joint letters make it all the more difficult to comprehend. Thus to make this job less tedious, various OCR resources have been developed; such as typewritten OCR, music OCR cursive OCR, hand print OCR and MICR. However, very small handwritten text, unusual fonts and mathematical formulas don’t work well with OCR.
Thus one of the major advantages of OCR is that it can scan text from paper and transform them into soft copies, which can be stored and used whenever needed. This leads to reduced paper management costs and easy access to valuable information.
08
Apr 09
High volume OCR
High volume OCR has a highly distributed and scalable architecture. The main components of the high volume OCR include server manager, a central unit meant for management of the system and several processing stations which perform the document and OCR conversion. Virtually unlimited number of stations for processing work is being controlled by the server manager. The conversion and the recognition tasks are distributed among the CPUs and the processing stations. This balances the workload across the system resources.
The processing throughput can be increased up to a great extent. This can be up to several thousands of pages per minute. Along with the scalable architecture a wide variety of features are aimed to make the conversion of the high volume document more cost effective yet productive.
08
Apr 09
Download OCR Software
Data and information is stored in files. The files are classified into various file formats. Data can also be in the form of images. The images can contain text patterns in them. This text is not visible to the normal document reader. Character recognition is the technique by which this text is extracted from the document and made visible to the document reader. Optical Character Recognition is the basic technique used for character recognition. This OCR may be implemented in your document reader by downloading OCR software. This software is available as an extension of the original document reader.
The OCR software will look for the text patterns in the document. The patterns got from the document are matched with predefined text templates in the OCR software database. If the text pattern in the document matches the text template, then a text layer is embedded in the document. The downloaded OCR software inserts this text layer to get embedded into the document. The downloaded OCR software can then extract the text which has been embedded. The text can then be used for searching the content of the document by keyword searches.
OCR software is available to download from the World Wide Web. This software can be installed in the system. It will be added as a plug-in to the existing document readers. This will enable document readers to open OCR embedded files using downloaded OCR software. OCR software is available as a freeware download from World Wide Web. Some downloadable OCR software are commercial software which requires a fee to download and install. The accuracy of the freeware OCR software may not be very high. They are useful if text have to be extracted from files whose text is in the same font or type. Commercial OCR software has an accuracy of nearly 99 percent. They can also support many fonts and can extract text from low quality images. There are also trial OCR softwares which can be used to get a feel of the product. It helps in the user making a choice for downloading OCR software. OCR softwares are becoming a welcome addition to most document readers since it adds functionality to it.
27
Mar 09
Unlock the potential of corporate data with OCR software
The OCR software converts images of book pages into a machine-processed, electronic version of the book’s text, dramatically reducing the storage needed for the book and allowing the text to be reformatted, searched, or edited in a word processor. Template-free data extraction and processing of data from documents into any backend system is also done by OCR software and compression of files provides added benefits as well. Sample document types include invoices, remittance statements and bills.
Functioning of an OCR software
Creating a compressed, searchable document using OCR and compression technology can improve the efficiency of a document capture environment. The scanned document is separated into multiple layers — a layer containing high-resolution text or hard edges, one layer of low-resolution background and another layer containing colors and soft edges. Then each layer is compressed separately according to an algorithm that yields the best results for image size and clarity. This is done on the basis of analytical strengths of the technology. The technology uses JPEG and JPEG 2000 for lossy and CCITT G4 and JBIG2 for lossless compression.
OCR software management
OCR file compression software products handle the sorting, retrieving and reproducing of documents with ease and flexibility. It completely eliminates the need for paper-based documents by scanning and archiving them. Tasks like indexing, storing, retrieving, viewing and annotating documents would all take place on your computer desktop like never before. With globalization and data security, most organizations are looking forward to a paperless organization for which the OCR compression software is a must. Most OCR software provides high speed conversion of documents while maintaining a high quality standard, which can be used when there is a huge backlog of documents to be scanned and accurately indexed.
26
Mar 09
Searchable files with OCR
You cannot search an imaged file without optical character recognition software, also known as OCR. Current technology does not allow you to search for text within an image, though there are a few search engines and search tools that claim to be able to search images. Generally, when we talk about a searchable file, what we are referencing is a text file, or an OCR’ed file. A text file in a computer is not an image which contains text. Even though human eyes can recognize such text, a computer cannot. A searchable file is not just an image file that contains what can be identified as text by the human eye.
How does OCR help in creating searchable files?
OCR is a great technology that converts text contained in image documents to text that is searchable by a computer. The software can scan this image file and recognize text in it. This helps create a searchable file from an otherwise non-searchable one.
How does OCR do that?
OCR technology is software that contains hundreds of thousands of bitmap images of Latin scripts that it uses to compare with segments of the scanned image document. When it finds a resemblance, it files that part of the document away as a string of text. This way, it can recognize and extract text from a complete image document. But this process requires one to store every possible script used and available, which is hardly possible for handwriting text.
25
Mar 09
When do you need OCR Batch Conversion?
You have a typed or printed document. You have to introduce a few changes in the document. What do you do other than retyping the entire document, while investing a lot of time? On the other hand, say you are badly in need of an article that you have stored carefully, and you cannot remember in which file you kept it. What do you do other than going through all your files in search of it? However, if you could digitize your documents, then you will be saved from all that trouble. Optical character recognition software provides an answer to your problem. OCR software is all that you can ask for to accomplish this task and batch OCR can do the trick for you. The use of OCR is indispensable for scanners, fax machines and other digital image copier machines that convert paper documents into digital forms.
How can OCR for batch conversion help you?
Batch OCR can convert large volumes of data to a digitized format. OCR for batch conversion creates documents that look like the original documents. OCR may interpret each character image of a document that is scanned and convert it into a format that is machine editable and readable. OCR for batch conversion helps you to convert bulks of your data into the digitized format at a single go.
OCR Review
OCR for batch conversion comes as a godsend to those who need to convert loads of documents to digitized format in a short time period. OCR for batch conversion is commonly used in offices, which deal with numerous documents. In fact, this software is the keyword for hassle and paper free office. OCR for batch conversion software has changed the way data is stored today.