OCR Software versus Document Capture Software

OCR Software versus Document Capture Software

So all OCR Software companies provide the ability to convert scanned files into text or searchable PDFs via the Optical Character Recognition process, but how do I capture/scan the images so the applications can do their conversion?

This is an interesting question.  Let's talk about Document Capture first.  This type of application is built from the ground up to scan/capture documents at a high rate of speed, provide the means to collect information about the documents through a number of means, and then export the document/data to a back end repository.  All document capture companies provide all types of OCR options, and usually OEM their OCR, ICR, OMR components from the major OCR application companies, like:  ABBYY, OpenText, Nuance, ReadSoft, etc.  Most of these companies have diversified their offering to include document capture, but their offerings far way short on the capture side in my opinion...they are OCR companies.

The real goal here is to get the best OCR results possible through a powerful OCR engine, and also minimize your time required to scan and process through the best document capture software.  So, if you are looking to do high volume OCR processing, I highly recommend choosing a capture application that utilizes your OCR engine of choice to get the best of both worlds.  I will write more on this topic in upcoming posts.  If you want some guidance on How to pick the right OCR Software, click on the link text.