Mobile Capture with PSI:Capture, SkyDrive and an iPad

 bit of an off topic post, but this demo includes barcode recognition within digital photos from an iPad:

OCR and PC Architecture

So just how important is your PC hardware when looking to use OCR Software?  Many of the desktop products do not take advantage of multi-core CPUs, and can have laggard performance numbers when it comes to Optical Character Recognition, Intelligent Character Recognition and Optical Mark Recognition.  Currently, playing with PSI:Capture, which offers a number of OCR options, and they have single, dual and quad core enablement in their licensing.  Dual core runs about 1.7 times the speed, and quad core gives a 2.7x improvement.

Why use OCR Software to perform full text conversion of images?

OCR Software

When we scan documents, they are just images, pictures of our paper.  For many organizations, this scanned image is exactly what they need, and a little index information about the document is sufficient to provide them with retrieval capability.

So why take the time and spend the money to utilize OCR Software to convert the scanned document to a searchable format?  Below are some reasons to always perform full text OCR of scanned documents:

1. Always provide every means possible for retrieval.  Just using index fields to search for scanned documents may seem like a fantastic idea, but what if the document is misidentified?  Or the indexer enters incorrect information?  Performing a full text OCR of the document can provide an insurance policy that a document can always be found through full text search.
2. Document Capture software today provides fast reliable OCR.  Most capture software on the market provides the ability to automatically convert the documents to searchable format for a small expense.  Some of the engines on the market can do the conversion at 100+ pages per minute, so there is really not much time wasted in the OCR conversion / recognition process.
3. OCR to PDF for a format that contains both image and text in one container.  Adobe provides the PDF image with hidden text option to give you a seachable file format that contains a pristine image.
4. Plan for the worst case.  Audits...legal issues...sometimes you need to search beyond the index fields, and full text can give you the ability to find the needle in the haystack.

OCR applications give you the means and capabilities to convert images to searhcable formats and there are many reasons to do the full text conversion.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Capture

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Capture

So what is document capture software and what does it have to do with OCR applications.  So, I think first, we need to differentiate between scanning software and capture software.  Here is a good blog post that goes over the differences, with regards to SharePoint Scanning.  Scanning Software just gives you the ability to convert paper to a digital form, and then OCR.  Capture Software takes this a step further, and is really a catalyst for some enhanced processing with your recognition engine.  Typical capture software will allow you to perform zone OCR, scan multiple documents in a single stack through separation, perform OCR based separation or even analyze the OCR text for expressions and then automatically extract the data.  Document Capture software provides enhanced data extraction, as an example, as do other vendors like Kofax, AnyDoc, Captiva, etc.

So, I guess the whole point here is that OCR software in most cases just provides a basic framework for the conversion process.  you really need a capture application to harness the true power of any OCR or recognition engine.