The data-driven era demands speed and security while storing data from hard documents. At this time there is a lot of data recorded on papers either by computer typing or handwriting. Processing this data is a crucial task for businesses, it takes more time and resources for businesses and still does not give accurate results. Data entry has been a frenetic task for businesses, and they require a technological solution that can solve all their problems. The solution should not comprise speed over security, thus should have a solid safety mechanism.

A character recognition technology commonly known as OCR can help in this case. It was invented to read characters from pages and transform them into telegraphic codes. Then it was modified where it produces a particular sound when placed on a page.

OCR Application: An Alternate to Data Entry

OCR abbreviation of optical character recognition is an automated data extraction technology that captures characters, letters, and numbers from scanned papers and images. In simple words, OCR is software to convert hard papers into machine-readable form. It presents paper details on the computer or mobile screen. OCR applications are broadly incorporated for extracting information from passports, bills, bank statements, and driving licenses. When it comes to digitizing data, OCR services are incorporated. The digitized documents have countless benefits.

It becomes easy to search, edit, and store soft data. Today organizations are using cognitive computing and big data which are not achievable without digital data. Just for a second, consider that there is no soft data and the world is using papers to store information. This means that a business has to wait for weeks to get a reply from an offshore customer.

OCR technology just requires an image to extract data from it.
Integrated With AI: How the Accuracy has Enhanced
The traditional OCR was not efficient enough, and it requires the paper to be in a specific format and position. With all the prerequisites fulfilled still it needs a human to cross-check. It works effectively on the paper on which it has trained well. This requires training the OCR for every new template which is a hectic task.

This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes to aid. The working of AI-powered OCR is explained below:
Preprocessing
It is divided into four steps:
De-Skew: The document needed to be properly aligned and have a specific standard. De-skew turns the document, smoothens its edges, and lastly makes it horizontally and vertically aligned
Binarization: Colored images are converted into grayscale i.e. white background and black fonts. OCR works better on black and white papers. It becomes easy for OCR application to differentiate between words and paper after binarization
Line Dismissal and Layout Review: In the case of tables and graphs, it recognizes lines, columns, and rows. It assists OCR to extract data within tables and charts
Script Recognition: If the documents uploaded to the OCR software are multilingual, the script can change multiple times within a single page. So, all the scripts are recognized to remove unnecessary delays during data extraction

Character Recognition
It creates isolation between characters through a matrix matching algorithm. It works on every part of the document pixel by pixel. The technique is very helpful on handwritten documents

Automatic Form Population
The extracted information is digitally populated in computer forms. The nearest neighbor technique in which the plucked words are compared with the words in the dictionary. The misspelled words are corrected in this step.

In A Nutshell

Data helps businesses in making more constructive decisions. Businesses conduct consumer surveys and analyze them to give better services. Most of the survey data is listed on papers as it is recorded physically by consumers. This data is then typed in the computer to create graphs and charts.

OCR services give a sigh of relief to businesses by automating and digitizing the whole data capture process. Businesses can now save their time and effort, moving towards more innovative approaches also. OCR screening will assist businesses in streamlining the organizational workflows.