Advantages and Disadvantages of Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

By kalyanDeep Learning, Machine Learning, OCR, Optical character recognition
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What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition)?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process that converts an image of text into a machine-readable text format. For example, if you scan a form or a receipt, your computer saves the scan as an image file. You cannot use a text editor to edit, search, or count the words in the image file. However, you can use OCR to convert the image into a text document with its contents stored as text data.

Usage of OCR

Some of the common usages of OCR are

  • Create automated workflows by digitizing PDF documents across different business units
  • Eliminating manual data entry by digitizing printed documents like reading passports, invoices, receipts, pay stubs, bank statements, etc.
  • Create secure access to sensitive information by digitizing Id cards like Passport, Voter ID, Driving License, credit cards, etc.
  • We can also extract information form standard forms like W9, W2, 1040 etc.
  • Digitizing printed books like the Gutenberg project

Advantages of Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Following are the advantages of OCR : 
 

  1. Information of OCR can be readable with high degree of accuracy. Flatbed scanners are very accurate and may produce reasonably top-quality images.
  2. Processing of OCR information is fast. Large quantities of text are often input quickly.
  3. A paper based form are often became an electronic form which is straightforward to store or send by mail.
  4. It is cheaper than paying someone amount to manually enter great deal of text data. Moreover it takes less time to convert within the electronic form.
  5. The latest software can re-create tables also as original layout.
  6. This process is much faster as compared to the manual typing the information into the system
  7. Advanced version can even Re create tables, columns and even produce sites.

Disadvantages of Optical character recognition (OCR)

Following are the drawbacks or disadvantages of OCR : 
 

  1. OCR text works efficiently with the printed text only and not with handwritten text. Handwriting must be learnt by the pc.
  2. OCR systems are expensive.
  3. There is the need of lot of space required by the image produced.
  4. The quality of the image can be lose during this process.
  5. Quality of the ultimate image depends on quality of the first image.
  6. All the documents got to be checked over carefully then manually corrected.
  7. Not 100% accurate, there are likely to be some mistakes made during the method.
  8. Not worth doing for little amounts of text.