How to Extract Text from Images Using OCR Technology?

Do your find it hard to maintain a paper database for your business? Or you can’t make copies of prior text manually?

If you are suffering from any of these ailments, the Ocr tool can make your life much easier.

Ocr technology is in fashion nowadays due to the ease it brings to businesses and individuals. It plays a major role in imparting several innovations, which most of us had never imagined before, to our day-to-day routine.

Not only collective organizations but also individuals who want to copy text from hand-written or printed notes can use this technology to get rid of the manual hassle.

What is OCR Technology?

OCR literally means Optical Character Recognition. Its name may remind you of the old days of scanners. 

Essentially it is a scanner but differs from it when it comes to extraction. An image-to-text tool extracts images from text and provides you with a digital form of text which you can edit or make changes to when required.

Evolution of OCR?

Nowadays, the image to text technology you see isn’t what it initially was in its inception. It went through a series of changes. Wars and human needs fueled the innovations in this tool. 

It is still being evolved and duly updated to optimize your work to the maximum. However, at first, the journey started when Charles Carey invented the retina scanner which used photocells.

 It was the first tool of its kind. It moreover, kickstarted the research in this field. In the meantime, several tools were invented but they didn’t provide much value. 

A major breakthrough came with the invention of the Optophone that aimed to assist blind people, as it produced tones when moved on written text.

 Goldberg’s statistical machine was useful research in the area of text to code, primarily telegraph morse code. 

IBM 1287 was an innovation that molded the journey towards images to text because it was the first device to read handwritten numbers.

Now it has been a widespread technology and a plethora of vendors provide this their services online.

 How you can extract text from images using this technology?

To get a soft copy of your text, you need to use an image to text converter. These tools are based on ocr technology, as they scan your picture containing the text you want to get and then extract it to a doc or text file.

1. Enter your image into the input box of a tool.
2. Click on the extract button.
3. You will get your required text in a short time.
4. Copy or save it in the storage device.

In this way, you may get numbers, words, or any kind of script from the images.

How OCR works:

A picture to text converter works in several steps to give you the result. You can know the quality of the tool by understanding how good it is in performing these steps. These stages are typically divided into three. Let’s see how these stages occur.

Preprocess:

As the name suggests, it deals with a lot of techniques to make your image free from any issue so that it becomes clear.

First of all, your image is colorful, to make it easily readable, the tool converts it into a black and white image. This technique is also called binarization.

In this technique, only two colors are used to get rid of any complications while extraction. This makes the image simpler.

 It also maintains a threshold of colors that fine-tunes the proper light and dark spots of the picture. To make it possible the text is given black color and the nontext area is given a white color.

After this process, the tool removes useless lines in the image that may indulge with the text and create an issue in understanding. 

Moreover, your picture may contain skewed words and lines at different angles, you have to make it at perfect horizontal shapes to angles to arrange them. Therefore, deskewing and despeckling is done to meet the right requirement. 

Process:

After ocr online technology preprocessing, the text inside the picture is ready to be extracted. First of all, segmentation is done to make sense of the text and to deal with the whole text in chunks. It also helps to get the work done in lesser time.

Each chunk of text is distinguished from the non-text as a segment or token. Since each token is usually a single word so it is easy to extract segment-wise instead of the whole lines.

The tool which has gone through machine learning is smart enough to recognize text when any character or word is shown to it. 

But to make it intelligent like that, you need to feed more data and train it to understand any kind of text.

The next step after segmentation is pattern recognition, where the text is compared to some known patterns already fed into the memory of the tool. 

These patterns are known as glyphs. However, there is a drawback to this technique. It does not recognize hand-written text.

 Your text should be of the same font and the same size as that of the glyphs so that the tool extracts it.

Alternatively, you can adopt another step that deals with artificial intelligence, as it takes the characters like humans to understand the text.

It understands each character by the number of strokes, lines, and the angles between them. Therefore, this step is called feature extraction.

Post-process:

In the post-process step, several lexical and grammatical mistakes are corrected. Most of the post-processing techniques are auxiliary just to make it more optimized and perfect.

This step may also involve a technique to suggest different replacing synonyms and sentences.

Wrapping it up:

The Ocr technology has multi-faceted value for you whether you are a single individual or a multinational company. You can accrue plenty of benefits from image to text converters. 

Whether you want to set up a digital database, transfer printed or hand-written text across numerous systems, edit an already written hard form text, you can use these tools.

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