Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the digital conversion of typewritten or printed text into computer-readable data. First developed over 30 years ago, the technology has since become essential in bridging the gap between paper-based and digital information. Software developers and enterprise architects rely on OCR every single day as a way to capture and digitize highly valuable information that would otherwise remain locked on paper.
Once regarded as a novel software accessory for scanners, more advanced capture and OCR applications have recently emerged that provide even broader and more valuable capabilities.
OCR has been essential in handling the large amounts of sensitive information on traditionally information-intensive documents in healthcare, financial services and government operations. Indeed, a new breed of OCR solutions have become more specialized and highly accurate, and as a result more integral to organizational performance.
Open source OCR code may seem free, but you’re starting from scratch, often with tools that are unproven and with limited capabilities.
Free Is Not a Good Price
Developers are working hard to integrate OCR and data capture capabilities into their products because of the extensive value that they both add. Before you move forward, remember the old adage, "you get what you pay for." There are a number of open source options available, and open source code may seem like a bargain, but it can ultimately be a costly decision for applications that must manage and maximize high-value, high-importance documents and information.
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Freeware may suffice for very limited and less-demanding business situations, but simply will not measure up for applications where information is of great importance and may present great financial risk to the organization. You can get a free trial for a professional grade OCR SDK tool online.
Professional Grade OCR
Professional grade OCR is vital when data accuracy and integrity is a must and adaptable workflow is important in order to capture the extended benefits of the technology.
There are many advanced capabilities that drive value and return on investment in multiple ways and place capture and OCR as vital, if not essential, contributors to company performance and profitability.
With many OCR SDK solutions available, how do you know which one is right for you? Here are three important capabilities to consider:
Document Cleaning and Preprocessing - Scanned images and data are often blurry and distorted, making it difficult to get a clean and easily "readable" image. Document cleaning and image preprocessing work to correct and remove the noise and garbage, and apply things like page rotation, de-skewing and cropping. Advanced capabilities include intelligent background filtering and adaptive binarization. The more advanced features, the more accurate and flexible the capture system will be. Rudimentary OCR systems are generally inadequate for more complex applications and challenging documentation.
Document Analysis - Today’s documents are substantially more complex than a simple page with black text printed on a white background. Layouts and formats include a wide variety of elements like tables, pictures, footers and headers, background images, and so on. Advanced OCR accommodates these different elements with a variety of advanced document analysis techniques. No-cost code simply does not have the ability to determine the location of elements like text blocks, tables, pictures and barcodes, as well as an understanding of the contextual meaning of these elements within each document or page automatically.
Document Reconstruction - Another important capability is document reconstruction, which is the ability to capture and read information contained on a document, and understand the elements and structure so it can be recreated in digital format. This capability is important in many markets and industries -- healthcare reform, for example, continues to push the industry toward an increasingly paperless environment. Advanced document reconstruction ensures that various elements like pictures, tables and graphs are all correctly captured, transferred and can be reconstructed to create a digital version of the original paper document.
Professional grade OCR is vital when data accuracy and adaptable workflow is a must.
Real World OCR
How is OCR used in the real world? Advanced capture and OCR applications have emerged in recent years that provide increasingly broad and strategic capabilities. Many opportunities exist for companies to bridge the gap between paper and digital media, especially in traditionally paper-intensive fields, and speed the pace of business and real-time customer service. Across the board, things like litigation and eDiscovery, regulatory compliance, and information governance are all pressing opportunities and vital concerns that are driving the adoption of advanced, professional grade OCR and capture solutions in all industries.
Here are a few examples of major industries that rely on OCR:
Healthcare
The University of Southern California Cancer Surveillance Program automated their medical records processing using OCR. They replaced slow and risk-prone manual processes with automated data capture paired with electronic submission of patient records to the California Cancer Registry. This approach lowered their operating costs, helped speed the submission of important data to the State, and eliminated the security risks associated with a paper-based process.
Financial Services
Finansbank headquartered in Istanbul uses OCR for automatic input of credit card application information. The bank processes nearly 10,000 forms per day, and the automated process increased data input accuracy dramatically while increasing the speed and efficiency of processing credit applications. Finansbank has been able to reduce dramatically the number of operators needed while increasing their throughput by over 1,000%.
Government
The Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation works to conserve and protect Alaska's wildlife. One of their many goals is to maintain healthy herd populations. This requires gathering information on the amount and distribution of hunting in the State, which resulted in thousands of hours of coding and data entry. When the agency adopted automated data capture using OCR they began seeing immediate improvement and ultimately eliminated over 1,600 hours a year in overtime and temporary staff.
Proven Capture Capabilities
Open source OCR code may be free, but you’re starting from scratch, often with tools that are unproven and with limited capabilities. We’ve got the answer, and worldwide support.
The ABBYY FlexiCapture OCR SDK is a professional grade capture tool that includes the same advanced OCR technologies that have been proven in the most demanding applications worldwide. FlexiCapture supports over 200 different languages – more than any OCR software combined. Our OCR SDK is currently running on over 40+ million devices so it is not only scalable, but it's been proven time and time again on virtually every operating platform, including LINUX.
Why spend months writing your own OCR engine or struggle with solutions that provide limited capability?
Don’t Start from Scratch
Why spend months writing your own OCR engine or struggle with solutions that provide limited capability? ABBYY offers a suite of professional grade capture tools in our family of OCR SDK engine products that work together to the answer. In short: free just doesn’t cut it. When you work ABBYY you not only get the best price point available for truly enterprise-class advanced capture capabilities, but you also have a turnkey solution ready to go.
Moving Forward
Software developers and application architects are discovering the power or OCR to bridge the gap between printed information and digital media. Now is the time to leverage the capabilities, but you can’t do it with freeware. Professional-grade capabilities are a must.
ABBYY technologies provide you with a platform for success and bring about a wide variety of innovations and systems that speed the pace of business, increase data accuracy, and eliminate costly and time-consuming manual processes. Over 1,000 companies and developers in 150 countries rely on ABBYY for technologies and solutions that capture, translate, extract and transform information into accessible and useful knowledge.
Get a free trial online or call +1 408-457-9777.
Derek Gerber is a Field Marketing Manager for ABBYY. Contact him at dgerber@abbyy.com
