Optical Character Recognition - OCR Software

OCR Software

Desktop and server OCR software

OCR software and ICR software technology are analytical artificial intelligence systems that consider sequences of characters rather than whole words or phrases. Based on the analysis of sequential lines and curves, OCR and ICR make 'best guesses' at characters using database look-up tables to closely associate or match the strings of characters that form words.

WebOCR & OnlineOCR

With IT technology development, the platform for people to use software has been changed from single PC platform to multi-platforms such as PC +Web-based+ Cloud Computing + Mobile devices. After 30 years development on the desktop, OCR software started to adapt to new application requirements; WebOCR also known as OnlineOCR or Web-based OCR service, has been a new trend to meet larger volume and larger group of users. Internet and broadband technologies have made WebOCR & OnlineOCR practically available to both individual users and enterprise customers. Since 2000, some major OCR vendors began offering WebOCR & Online software, a number of new entrants companies seized the opportunity to develop innovative Web-based OCR services, some of which are free of charge.

Application-oriented OCR

Since OCR technology has been more and more widely applied to paper-intensive industry, it is facing more complex images environment in the real world. For example: complicated backgrounds, degraded-images, heavy-noise, paper skew, picture distortion, low-resolution, disturbed by grid & lines, text image consisting of special fonts, symbols, glossary words and etc. All the factors affect OCR products’ stability in recognition accuracy.

In recent years, the major OCR technology providers began to develop dedicated OCR systems, each for special types of images. They combine various optimization methods related to the special image, such as business rules, standard expression, glossary or dictionary and rich information contained in color images, to improve the recognition accuracy.

Such strategy to customize OCR technology is called “Application-Oriented OCR” or "Customized OCR", widely used in the fields of Business-card OCR, Invoice OCR, Screenshot OCR, ID card OCR, Driver-license OCR or Auto plant OCR, and so on.