How does OCR software work?

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• published: 05 Aug 2009
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http://www.ocrterminal.com/ Optical character recognition works by analyzing your image and identifying characters as accurately as possible. The video gives a brief overview of some Imaging techniques used by popular OCR software. Brought to you by the online OCR service - OCR Terminal. Transcript of this video: Optical Character recognition or OCR as it is popularly known, is the process of extracting text from images of documents. These images could have been produced by scanners, digital cameras or even mobile phones and they might contain text based information which you might have to edit. Instead of having to retype all the text, you could use OCR to make things a little easier. Let me give you an example - I just scanned a document and it looks like this. You can save it as a .tiff, .png or .jpeg file. Here are a couple of issues typically associated with scanned images. Before your document is OCR-ed, some preprocessing actions take place: - Such skewed images typically result from a sheet-fed scanner as opposed to a flatbed scanner. These slighted rotated images will be corrected. - You might have encountered those lines across your scanned documents that created small breaks, gaps and holes? These will be eliminated during the imaging process. - There will also be an automatic detection of page orientation. Other operations such imaging techniques such as "despeckling, noise removal and deinterlacing" are performed so that the OCR engine gets the cleanest possible image. Next, area where written/printed text is found on your document is marked out and segmented into isolated characters. The OCR engine then takes over and identifies them. Modern OCR engines will not only deliver editable and searchable text but also preserve the page formatting such as the different font, colour, columns, figures, tabular data, headers and footers. At OCR Terminal, we make things really easy -- just upload the image, click yes and your image is converted to your preferred format of .doc, .pdf, .rtf, .txt. So try it for yourself. Sign up for a trial account at www.ocrterminal.com.