OCR Software and Image Processing

OCR Software and Image Processing

Why is image processing so important when utilizing Optical Character Recognition Software?

In order to get the highest possible accuracy with your OCR Application, the recognition process needs to have a clean image to examine.  The most important are auto-orientation, deskew and despeckle.  The Auto-orientation process examines tha page, and makes sure it is oriented correclty for the whole recognition process.  Deskew examines the page for any skewing, whcih may occur during the scan process, and "rights" the page to make sure the text is inline throughout the page.  Despeckle takes away any speckles on the page that can be falsely identified as font characters, but also can be attributed to any misreads of characters.

Older documents may require other functions, such as font improvement and deshading to insure the highest possible accuracy in the overall OCR process.