OCR and ICR | Document Scanning Services in Sutton, Surrey and London

OCR and ICR

Full Text Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Utilising the latest advanced document imaging technologies we can convert scanned documents and electronic files (PDF’s, digital images) into editable and searchable data.

OCR enables full-text searching of words or phrases indicating their location within a document, for fast and easy retrieval, without the need to read through an entire document to find information.

As a result, document searches can be done far more efficiently reducing what use to take hours or days to minutes.

The benefits of OCR technology include:

Full-text search results identify where key words are found and how they appear in context
Quickly locate files based on a word, phrase, date or subject matter that was not indexed.
Avoid the time, cost and effort of having staff manually type in data.
Data can be edited, manipulated and shared across applications to streamline communications and workflow.

The accuracy of OCR depends upon the quality of the original printed text. If printed on a good quality printer then an accuracy of up to 99.95% can be achieved. If your documents contain tables or flowcharts using OCR technology we can format the text from your tables and flowcharts. Pictures, graphics and drawing objects can also be formatted. Documents that have been OCR processed appear exactly the same as the original document but with the advantage they can be edited or searched as required.

ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition)

ICR is used to capture handwriting from documents like forms and applications. It is similar to OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which reads machine print, but the technique is more advanced and complex.

To capture data from a handwritten document, it is first necessary to scan documents at a minimum resolution of 300dpi. When the document has been turned into an electronic image, the ICR software can start extracting data.

The key to a good ICR solution is how well the software can understand and make sense of all the letters and characters in the image.

Datastor employ the latest software from market leaders to provide this service however as for OCR, the accuracy is dependant on the quality of the original document.