Gone are the times when physical documents were more valuable and important than digital documents. Over time, technology has been advancing, giving way to systems, processes, solutions, etc. that enable information management, in an agile, secure and effective way.
Today companies must live with the digital world, where they have had to evolve their operations: administrative, commercial, financial, etc. making use of various digital platforms.
But what makes digitization leap and step?
There has been much talk about Optical Character Recognition (OCR) algorithms.
Even when it's not a newly created technology it's important to know how it works and above all, what its advances in time and possible applications are.
When a document is scanned, a graphical representation of the document is obtained, it is as if a photo was obtained, but this photo has value only when it is accessed and the caller "reads" that document.
OCR algorithms, what they do is "read" that information and transform it into data so that, in this way, that photo is transformed into INFORMATION that can be analyzed by different systems.
The advancement has reached such a degree that even some OCR algorithms can already detect and recognize handwriting and turn it into digital data, evolving to the concept known as ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition).
How does an OCR work?
When scanning a document through an OCR, that document is transformed from a physical document to a bitmap (that is, it is converted to a text box).
The OCR program, first of all, performs document correction (removes imperfections), and converts it to a black and white image. The next step is to zone the document, where tables, paragraphs, columns, and so on are identified. This gives you the opportunity to analyze the document pixel by pixel, so that individually, characters and symbols are identified. In this way the OCR system can recognize each character, and convert it into a plain text, which can be edited.
There are many solutions that include the OCR system, but the most important thing is to identify that the selected solution is a comprehensive solution; that allows you to intelligently digitize, and exploit information securely, for the productivity and benefit of individuals and businesses.
