How does ocr software work?

Step 5 — Detecting words and lines of text: This is the beginning stage of actual character recognition. The software begins to identify individual words and entire lines of data.

This is a critical pre-process for properly recognizing characters as it sets the stage for the analysis and correction of broken or merged characters. The OCR software must now break down and resolve these errors in order to properly interpret the appropriate characters.

Now that the original file has been processed, cleaned, and fixed — the OCR technology can begin to read and translate characters. Each image of every character is converted into a character code. If the algorithm is unsure of a character — the software will produce multiple character codes and choose the proper character later on. Step 8 — Saving the file: After the file has been fully interpreted, it can be saved to your desired file format.

While there is much more to OCR software, these 8 steps make up the primary processes involved in Optical Character Recognition. Search for:. Main Menu. How Optical Character Recognition Works: Optical character recognition software takes several steps to convert an image file into an editable document. The OCR Process:. Many OCR algorithms can handle bi-tonal images only, so color or grayscale images must be converted to bi-tonal.

The process is called "binarization. Lines detection and removal. This step is required to improve page layout analysis, to achieve better recognition quality for underlined text, to detect tables, etc. Page layout analysis also called "zoning". The OCR system must detect the positions and types of all important areas in the image. Detection of text lines and words. Sometimes it is not an easy task because of different font sizes and small spaces between words. Combined-broken characters analysis.

Oftentimes, some characters are broken into several parts, or some characters touch each other. This multilingual OCR software can automatically detect and recognize text from scanned documents, enabling you to easily copy, extract, search, and edit content.

Buy PDFelement right now! Audrey Goodwin. Try It Free. Audrey Goodwin chief Editor. Learn more about document scanning best practices in our comprehensive guide. Contact us today! How much time have you spent looking for a stray piece of paper in the files or stacks of paper? What Is Optical Character Recognition? The OCR Software Handwriting Challenge Recognizing and accurately converting handwriting is more challenging than typed documents for OCR software, due to the vast differences in people's writing styles.

Topic: how to scan a document.