What is Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?

Download this datasheet to learn more about Adlib’s OCR engine

If you’re in the document management or capture space, it’s more than likely you will see the words Optical Character Recognition or OCR on a daily basis. But ever wonder what it really means and how it all works?

Breaking down OCR

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a means for converting printed or written text characters—captured as images during scanning—into computer-based, encoded text. Once printed pages have been digitized in this manger, they can be searched electronically, archived in compact PDF format, and displayed online.

OCR, which combines pattern recognition and artificial intelligence—has undergone tremendous improvements in recent years, driven by more powerful processors, enhanced image capture, and better conversion algorithms.

Understanding the benefits of OCR

What is the business value for investing in Optical Character Recognition technology? The benefits are multi-fold:

• Liberating information for electronic searches: Valuable data and records circulating throughout an organization in paper formats can be automatically converted to structured data so the information can be shared, stored and analyzed.
• Supporting regulatory mandates: Regulatory mandates in a number of industries—including government, healthcare, pharmaceutical, transportation, and more—can be met by using OCR to process images and image-only documents, making the information contained in them available to meet requirements.
• Delivering industry-leading accuracy: The OCR engine used by Adlib is refined and enhanced to support enterprise workloads and requirements. Accuracy of Optical Character Recognition is consistently delivered at levels close to 100 percent.

Adlib’s OCR engine

Adlib uses the most accurate, most advanced technology in the industry to achieve exceptional results with accuracy approaching 100 percent. Learn more about how Adlib converts text in images to searchable content in PDFs with OCR. You can also find more technical details about Adlib’s OCR engine in this datasheet.