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OCR is a technology that has been nothing short of revolutionizing how we capture information from images. It’s a tool that, when adopted by companies, allows them to automate reading and interpreting their digital documents.
Essentially, the technology consists of converting documents or images into editable and searchable text.
In this sense, we can safely state that Optical Character Recognition increases operational efficiency and provides a much more accurate analysis of the data contained in natively digital or digitized documents.
Digitizing and archiving documents, information retrieval, process automation, and accessibility are some possibilities offered by document management platforms that feature OCR capabilities.
Due to its immense importance for document management and process optimization, let’s dive in everything that involves OCR technology.
What is OCR?
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It’s a technological feature capable of converting an image or digital document into copyable and editable text.
When you take a photo of a document and your phone allows you to copy the text as if you had typed it is precisely what it does: it gives us the ability to extract data in the form of actual text.
Although very useful, it isn’t a feature that steals the spotlight. After all, it works in the background, the text is extracted, but the extraction mechanism is not seen.
You know that you can copy the text entirely and paste it into a message, for example, but you don’t actually realize that OCR is doing it.
Without Optical Character Recognition, an image is just an image. We simply can’t edit, copy, or search for items present in that file.
OCR can recognize letters, words, patterns, line items, phrases, and in some cases, handwriting. To improve the accuracy of data extraction, the technology is commonly associated with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
Therefore, the feature adapts and gets better as it is trained, expanding the range of processed documents.
The moment a company decides to adopt this type of solution, the possibility for process automation goes to a whole new level. As it works with large volumes of data, OCR reduces manual operations, ensuring greater productivity and performance.
How does this feature work?
The functioning of OCR consists of identifying and understanding the characters in the image, transforming them into binary codes understood by the computer. The processing happens in three parts:
- 1st Pre-processing: initially, the technology will seek ways to make the image clearer and more suitable for data capture. This includes eliminating shadows, converting everything to black and white, re-framing, and excluding what is not text;
- 2nd Recognition: at this stage, there are two methods employed. The first is a comparison between the extracted characters and a previous base of symbols to recognize patterns. The second captures each characteristic of the text, such as edges, curves, and contours, to compose a format and converge to an identification that appears to be the closest.
- 3rd Post-processing: finally, the eligible characters from the image are compared to a word base consistent with the context, according to a specific logic. Subsequently, the OCR algorithms check which element in the database has the highest percentage of chances of matching the extracted character. Thus, the text is recognized, with errors corrected and formatted according to the rules of the language or idiom.
It may seem complex, but the information extraction process happens in a matter of seconds. This explains why OCR is such an important part of business document digitization and sorting.
Advantages provided by OCR
Within businesses, OCR can be used in processes from different departments, such as finances, management, accounting, and marketing, just to name a few. Among its positive outcomes, the following stand out:
- time saving, efficiency, and agility;
- automation of processes where document data is automatically extracted;
- reduction of rework and backoffice costs;
- reduction of errors resulting from incorrect manual entry;
- simplified workflows;
- better user experience without the need to fill out extensive forms, and no rejections due to typing errors or incorrect information entry;
- document verification and database search, such as the Federal Revenue Service, reducing fraud;
- digital accessibility;
- improvement in document organization and control, enabling information retrieval;
- greater security and document compliance.
OCR in Electronic Document Management
It’s practically impossible to talk about efficiency in document management without mentioning OCR. Every day, companies receive and process a large volume of data and documents. This scenario justifies the need to adopt an electronic document management system.
In practice, firstly, Optical Character Recognition will validate the received document, analyzing the image quality and automatically rejecting photos that are not documents.
Regarding electronic document management, Fusion Platform works with OCR in its GED feature. This combination digitizes and automatically converts documents, eliminating the need to input data manually.
Thus, it is possible to extract relevant data, such as name and date of birth. This information can be added to process forms, ensuring workflow agility.
Documents are indexed so that the extracted data is categorized and can be searched according to criteria or keywords.
In this sense, within companies of various sizes and fields of activity, OCR is useful for:
- digitizing documents and facilitating storage and search;
- extracting information from images such as receipts, invoices, bills, and other documents;
- making PDF files editable and accessible;
- speeding up the workflow;
- automating tasks involving text manipulation.
Neomind’s Fusion Platform uses OCR to extract information and make documents searchable with full permission control. In other words, only authorized users can access, manipulate, and edit certain documents.
PDF files are converted into editable texts, and future modifications will be attributed and recorded in the digital versioning flow. Documents can also be digitally signed, with all security and legal validation.
Don’t waste more time extracting data from documents manually, implement document management and reap all the benefits of OCR.
Try Fusion Platform and check out these and many other advantages.
