How OCR Based Online Tools Plays A Vital Role In Converting Images To Text

• By Branson Tachao
• 21-02-2022
• Technology

In this era of digitalization, people find ways and means to convert their hard form data into digital form for greater productivity.

Students, entrepreneurs, and writers have to deal with the bulk of paperwork daily. Therefore, they demand a single tool that can easily shift their text to soft form for future use.

For this purpose, OCR technology comes as the best way to extract the data from images. In this article let’s know how OCR is playing a vital role in converting images to text.

What is Optical Character Recognition?

OCR as its name depicts, is a technology, based on AI. It understands your characters and helps you convert them through different tools.

The converter used to convert scanned text into editable text is an image-to-text converter.

To use this tool, first, you need to capture or scan the images that you want to convert.

Then you can upload these images on the online image to text converter to extract the written words. In this way, you may get the desired output. You can use that digital data for various uses.

How Does OCR Convert Images Into Text?

There are a lot of image-to-text tools on the internet. You can find one easily with a google search. However, as far as the mechanism of this tool is concerned, an image-to-text tool plays a vital role in converting image to text through three stages.

The function of OCR is spawned into three-tier stages. Each stage performs a specific task and is integral for the whole process.

Preprocessing stage:

First of all, the tool is trained with different images samples so that it develops a recognition power. Often machine learning algorithms are used to train the tool.

Before text extraction, the tool must get clear images to produce efficient results. Therefore, this stage is called preprocessing stage.

The tool first detects the nature of text and language and then converts it into the editable text form.

This process brings a compact picture of your text. After that, the tool skews the tilted characters, words, and lines at the best angles.

For the extraction stage to initiate, the tool converts the text into chunks. This process is called tokenization.

Processing stage:

Once the image is ready for the main process, it is sent to different extraction algorithms for conversion. There are two main text extraction algorithms available.

One is pattern recognition that matches your image text with a pre-existing template. If the characters get matched, the tool extracts them into soft form.

This is also a drawback of this algorithm because it does not produce satisfactory results with hand-written text.

The second algorithm is feature extraction. This algorithm employs deep learning to extract the features of each character.

It understands your text by its features such as lines, angles, and curves of characters. After that, it extracts the text into digital form.

Post-processing stage:

This stage isn’t necessary for converting images to text, yet it adds to the best results. After proper text extraction, the tool goes far ahead to remove grammatical and spelling errors in your text.

Here are 03 steps involved in converting images to text:

Step1:

Upload the image

Supported extensions: jpg, and png

Step2:

Click the “Extract Text” button

Step3:

Copy or download the text.

Why Image to Text Conversion Is Vital for You?

People belonging to different fields of life need an image-to-text tool to help them increase their workflow and productivity.

For instance, business owners use OCR to maintain a proper record of everything. As the paper database is prone to damage, you can convert those papers into a digital database through OCR.

Moreover, your business workflow becomes better when you spend less on paper and focus more on fast-speed data sorting and distribution among all your employees.

These tools may also help students in their academic careers. Instead of typing the hand-written notes, they can simply scan them and get a soft copy.

In this way, they can use this tool to help them create exceptional assignments in much less time. You might have seen the use of OCR for marketing and brand awareness.

Nowadays, companies are using an image to text tools to attract people to use their products. For example, some companies offer coupons which when scanned through OCR, provide exciting prizes.

Final Words:

The image-to-text tools available on the internet converts the text present inside the images into editable form. These images can be of handwritten text. You can also convert pdf into document files easily.

OCR technology plays a vital role in text extraction. This image-to-text conversion helps businesses automate their work, creates exceptional assignments and research papers, and helps in the marketing of products.