Optical Character Recognition - What's it all about?

Optical character recognition, or 'OCR', is alack of information contained in the cursive
technology that allows digital images of typed orcharacters.
handwritten text to be transferred into anLike I said, optical character recognition is
editable text document. For example, if youbecoming increasingly popular. It is becoming
hooked up a scanner to your computer and usedpopular in areas of work that require massive
the scanner to scan a handwritten essay into aamounts of printed documents to be sorted. One
digital photo, you could take that digital photo andexample of these areas is in the legal profession.
use optical character recognition software toOptical character recognition greatly reduces the
"see" and "grab" the text from the digital phototime required for these printed documents to be
so you can edit that text on your computer in asorted. The time reduced can amount to days!
program like Microsoft Word, Notepad, orThe United States Post Office has also been using
TextEdit.optical character recognition since 1965.
For the more "geeky" readers, optical characterFor a normal computer user who wants to be
recognition takes the picture of text andable to edit scanned documents of text, there
translates the text into Unicode or ASCII. Fromare many different types of software solutions
wikipedia.org, "unicode is an industry standardavailable. Different software solutions will allow
designed to allow text and symbols from all ofboth scanned handwritten and typed text to be
the writing systems of the world to betranslated, while some may only allow scanned
consistently represented and manipulated bytyped text to be translated. There are a couple
computers". Also from wikipedia.org, "ASCIIoptical character recognition programs that are
(American Standard Code for Informationavailable for free.
Interchange) is a character encoding based on theSome free ones are:
English alphabet." Basically, optical character- SimpleOCR:
recognition technologies outputs text that is- OCRAD:
recognized by computers.If you are looking to spend money on an optical
Optical character recognition technologies can becharacter recognition program, expect to cough
found used in different software solutions, butup some cash. These OCR programs are in the
software is considered a low budget way to usearea of $100. The following is a list of some of
optical character recognition technology. In morethese programs:
complex optical character recognition systems, it-
is usual that a combination of both hardware and-
software will be used.-
While optical character recognition technology hasCheck out the websites to see what software
become increasingly popular and research for itsolution will work best for you. Many of these
has intensified, the rates of text recognition areprograms allow you to try them for a short trial
variable. For handwritten optical characterperiod. It is definitely worth to check out as it
recognition, the rate of recognition is 80% toallows you to further explore optical character
90% with clean handwriting. For cursive text, therecognition technology.
rate of recognition is quite lower because of the