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Steve Finley
Steve Finley is the General Manager of Business Systems, Inc. He has been with BSI for 28 years and is available to assist in any IT, Software or Workflow projects you may be considering. You may contact him at (316) 262-2478 or come by and visit their Show Room and Technology Lab at 222 W. Murdock, Wichita, KS 67203, Monday thru Friday.
Business
2004-09-01 12:02:00
What is OCR?
ANSWER: Whether at home or at the office, the use of scanners to efficiently turn ordinary paper documents into data files is changing the way we store, manipulate and distribute information.  OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is just one of the optional processes that can take place on the data file once it has been imaged or scanned. When scanning, the imaging process records changes in light intensity reflected from the document and records that information as a matrix of dots.  An electrical representation of the original is now stored as a bitmapped image usually in TIFF (Tagged-image File Format) or PDF (Portable Document Format).  The resolution or number of dots per inch (dpi) produced by the scanner determines how closely the digital image will represent the original.  As a rule of thumb, 300dpi will give optimal results for OCR from a good quality original.  If the text is small or the original quality is low, a higher scanning resolution may be required.  Beware that the higher resolution results in a larger file size, which may become an issue if the file is to be stored for later use.The OCR process transforms the bitmapped image of printed text into text code that is now machine readable.  From here the real benefits of OCR can be realized.   Consider that a person manually entering data can only enter 2 to 3 characters per second, while OCR characters can be read at 10,000 per second.  Take that letter or contract that needs to be retyped; instead scan and OCR, giving you an editable recreation of the document in your favorite word processing software for minor changes or updates. Think of the time that can be saved.The United States Postal Service has been using OCR machines to sort mail since 1965, Banks and financial institutions scan enormous amounts of checks each day using MICR (magnetic ink character recognition), another form of OCR with less than one read error per 20,000 to 30,000 checks. For Document Management Systems, large numbers of forms such as invoices, insurance forms, etc. can be quickly scanned with zone OCR performed on specific areas of the document such as invoice number, account number and customer name and address.  This information is then recorded for instant retrieval of the files at a latter time.In the legal world digital documents must be exact duplicates of the originals to be used as evidence in court.  Making the documents searchable enables attorneys to find the half-dozen pertinent pages among the potential 50,000 or more pages in a case.  When attorneys work on the PDF files they have created, they can annotate them, and those annotations can later be searched as well. The ability to create, find, and distribute information is not only increasing our productivity and efficiency, it is also freeing up acres of storage space once used for file cabinets and boxes full of paper documents.  With the price of OCR software now down to an affordable level, think about how you are handling paper and what imaging with OCR can do for you.
 
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