The Benefits And Use-Cases Of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Services

• By James Watson
• 18-11-2021
• Misc

The fast-growing world is not only getting advanced in its technology but also facing crimes that are increasing regularly when criminals apply modern tactics for their own benefits in attempting breaches. The criminals generate new documents on someone else’s identity and use them for their inhuman objectives. To combat such circumstances, a character recognition app is developed. Which is a mechanism used in various businesses to extract data from documents and helps to reduce the overall time span comparative to manual data entry with remarkable accuracy.

Documents Verified in OCR Scanner App

Structured documents
Structured documents are documents that have a predetermined format and structure. Intelligent OCR can draw out the data from structured documents with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Required information can be obtained through OCR App like name, date of birth, issue date, and picture.

A list of structured documents are given below:

Driving licenses
Passports
ID cards
Utility bills
Credit and debit cards

Unstructured Documents
Unstructured documents do not have any specific placement of information and do not follow any format. These documents are such documents as legal agreements which involve dates, terms, and parties but variations are considered in it because of negotiations between people, and also the information of the location is not standard.

Some unstructured documents are:

PDFs
Handwritten Documents
Photos
Social Media Contents

How Does the OCR Technology Work?
There are three ways given below in which OCR technology works:
1- Pre Processing
2- Data Extraction
3- Post Processing

Pre Processing
There are four subdivisions in the process of Pre Processing they are:

Cleaning: In this process, the brightness and contrast of an image are maintained and the borders of the image are rectified to detect the threshold.

Deskewing: This procedure helps to straighten the image of the text on the document in case of any curve image of the text.

Sharpening and Shake Reduction of the Image: This process helps to clear the images which are blurry and not cleared and taken from the smartphones.

Normalization: In the normalization process, an image that is passed through many processes is smoothed out to maintain the condition of light on it.

Data Extraction
Data extraction is done in two ways given below:

Segmentation
In this process of data extraction, the data is analyzed deeply and detects the styles, text block, creation of lines, stylized bitmaps, and in the end characters are extracted.

Extraction of Features
This process helps to figure out the curve lines, holes, straight lines, and several loops which are detected through the modern OCR services without any human output in real-time.

Post Processing
This step serves neural network models which are used for extracting data. Which helps the machine learning algorithms to extract the texts by their font size, style, and different types of documents

OCR Technology And Its Benefits at Business Level
Through strong OCR services, businesses can extract data from electronic or paper documents worldwide. This helps the authorities to get rid of human efforts and move towards digitization according to the needs of customers. OCR text recognition app has many benefits for the businesses, which are the following:

Diminish Manual Identification: Onboarding the identity of each individual is a part of business, for this OCR App is required to automatically extract the customer’s details and verify it.

Reduction of Cost: Providing better customer services through the OCR process reduces the human effort in verifying the documents.

Replacement of Manual Data Entry Operations: Businesses employ OCR document scanners to check the identities and information of collection of their customer’s documents within real-time and avoid manual data entries as it requires a long time along with errors in the procedures.

Enhance the Productive Capacity of Business: OCR App eventually reforms the productivity of the business. The previously used resources which perform operations manually can be used in other valuable work.

Industries that could use Character Recognition App
There are several industries that can use OCR scanning given below;

Financial Institutions(banking, accounting, insurance, and credit company)

Loan applications
Customer onboarding
Account opening
Receipt processing
Account management

Healthcare industries

Preserving patients Records
Insurance processing
Billing processing

Manufacturing

Sales order processing
Payments
Accounts payable and receivable

Retail and eCommerce:

Customers document verification
Bill processing
Account opening

Conclusion
Concluding the whole conversation, it is noticed that OCR services are playing a mandatory role in all industries in examining and verifying structured and unstructured documents accurately in real-time.