Introduction

Optical Character Recognition

Simply defined, OCR is a set of computer vision tasks that convert scanned documents and images into machine readable text. It takes images of documents, invoices and receipts, finds text in it and converts it into a format that machines can better process. You want to read information off of ID cards or read numbers on a bank cheque, OCR is what will drive your software. You might need to read the different characters from a cheque, extract the account number, amount, currency, date etc.

Anywhere there is a lot of paperwork or manual effort involved, OCR technology can enable image and text based process automation. Being able to digitize information in an accurate way can help business processes become smoother, easier and a lot more reliable along with reducing the manpower required to execute these processes. For big organizations who have to deal with a lot of forms, invoices, receipts, etc, being able to digitize all the information, storing and structuring the data, making it searchable and editable is a step closer to a paper-free world.