What is OCR
OCR is a solution to the problem of having to manually copy the content of often extensive documents when entering them into the system. This is particularly important and helpful during the digitization of library resources.
Thanks to OCR, at the moment of uploading a scanned document – regardless of whether it is an image/photo or in PDF format – characters and whole words, and even sentences, are recognized. This not only allows for easy obtaining of the entire text of the document, but also enables its automatic classification or extraction of detailed data.
Digitization and digitalization of companies is an inseparable element of modern business. Companies compete in the process of digitalization by introducing many innovations and system functions in their companies. One of the innovative tools for digitalization with the PDF documents OCR goes to SwifDoo PDF for Windows program.
OCR program for entering scanned documents
What is the OCR function for and what is it? The OCR tool is a function that allows optical character recognition from a PDF, JPG, JPEG, TIFF or PNG file. The OCR function allows for preliminary, intelligent processing of data from a scanned image or PDF documents.
OCR recognizes contractor data, NIP, net, gross, VAT amounts. The OCR mechanism also recognizes descriptions, so documents containing text are no challenge for it. The OCR service also reads invoice numbers and transfers them to the accounting system.
The OCR program is a great convenience for financial and accounting departments. Thanks to intelligent data processing and initial entry into the ERP system, the work of accountants is optimized and shortened as much as possible. It also works smoothly when you try to convert a file, such as PDF to Word or PDF to DWG, etc.
What you can do with OCR
With OCR you can recognize the content of documents. The effectiveness of the OCR system is very high. Thanks to advanced algorithms, OCR reduces errors caused by the human factor. Using the OCR function – scanning text from files and transferring them to the system, you will reduce the amount of work in your company consisting of time-consuming, manual data transfer.
The OCR program allows your employees to optimize their work in the ERP system and instead of entering documents, they only have to verify them after loading image files.
More programs that use OCR
Examples of software using OCR are programs created by the world’s largest companies, such as Amazon Textract, Google Books, or ABBY Finereader.
As an interesting fact related to OCR technology, it is worth noting that one of the ways to prepare the so-called training set (for learning character recognition algorithms) is the popular reCAPTCHA – a solution used both to increase the security of websites and to recognize fragments of scanned text by the user, and ultimately enabling the algorithm to better indicate different possibilities of character appearance.
What influences the effectiveness of OCR programs?
There are many automatic text recognition solutions available on the market, but their quality varies significantly.
What is the reason for this? First of all, the use of different algorithms for classifying characters and text areas, but also the diversity of training sets. The level of text distortion that is acceptable for the program is also key in this case. Available products also differ in speed of operation, which is not without significance – because it significantly affects the comfort of use.
Why is it worth implementing an OCR system?
Using the OCR function/program, thanks to its functionalities, we are able to automate the process of entering documents from created PDF files, or word programs or others. OCR recognizes, sends OCR documents to the ERP system and processes them in it in such a way as to match the data to the corresponding columns.