OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a data entry method that involves recognition and digitized scanning of written and printed text. It is a computer technology that uses image analysis to turn digital images of printed text into letters and numbers that other computer programs, such as word processors, can use. The text is translated into character codes to search and edit electronically easily.
History
Machine reading came into use in the 1960s for handling cheques, payment cards, and the like—the technology then required that the text be printed with special fonts that reduced the risk of misreading. In the 1970s, Ray Kurzweil invented a machine-reading technique to handle all standard fonts. Nowadays, there are machine-reading programs that can run on any personal computer. With the help of a scanner, the printed text is transformed into a digital image, which the machine reading program then analyzes.
Transform images into searchable text
The OCR net library supports scanned images and OCR processing PDF documents. You can transform images to searchable text with just a few lines of code. You can also retrieve individual words, letters, and paragraphs.
This OCR has improved the process of data entry. This c# OCR free software tool quickly converts scanned documents to searchable text files.
OCR-based data entry helps a business to increase the efficiency of work as it can search through a lot of content. Employees don’t need to look for documents in a records room; they can access them right at their desks.
OCR eliminates the cost of lost documents too. Also, automated data entry tools like OCR data entry means fewer errors and more efficient data entry. Data loss can be successfully handled by OCR data entry. OCR can scan- and catalog information, and data can be stored in electronic format in servers, eliminating paper storage.
Using Tesseract
Iron OCR uses Tesseract, an academic OCR library available free of charge. Tesseract is a good resource for developers, but it isn’t a full OCR library when dealing with photographed or scanned images.
To use Tesseract for scanned or photographed documents, you must perform image preprocessing, normally with Photoshop batch scripts. One of Iron OCR’s advantages is that it makes things easier. It has simple variables you can use to detect and preprocess images so that the text is out fairly quickly.
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Also, Iron OCR has an error model used to determine if a fault occurs during the OCR process. You can know what went wrong, and you can correct it.
There are authorized distributors of licenses from IronOCR.
The software enables software engineers to read text content from PDFs and images in .NET applications and Web sites. Supports lots of languages. Iron Software’s OCR library can be used inside desktop, Web, and MVC. There is plenty of useful IronOCR features, some of which are –
- Designed for C# VB.Net
- Reads barcodes and text from scanned images and PDFs
- Supports many international languages
- The OCR library offers classes to add functionality to desktop, console, and web.
If you get a paper document, for instance, or a PDF contract and you want to repurpose data, you’re going to need OCR software to single out letters and put them into words and sentences to enable you to access and edit all the content of the original document.
The entire process of this data conversion takes virtually no time at all, and the final document looks just like the original. Learning how OCR software can help you in so many ways is to your advantage.
Part Photos courtesy of gettyimages
