The Perfect Optical Character Recognition Software

An optical character recognition software is practically a magical factor: it gives you the power to "summon" characters, words, propositions, phrases from your favorite book directly into your favorite text editor. Of course, in this magic act, the almighty hardware have an crucial role too, but he is only the brawn, where the OCR software is the brains.

Firstly, a great OCR software program would have to be fully UTF8 capable meaning that it can recognize diacritics, unique characters from languages like Greek, Cyrillic, Swedish, Czech, Polish, Romanian, etc.

Beside the "classical" export solutions to formats as pdf, doc, rtf, xls etc, a contemporary OCR software really should have integrated as well, database integration capabilities.

Having database interoperability, the software can make certain integration with document management and monitoring tools for personal use or corporate use.

There are four phases in the transformation procedure from an image containing text to a rich text format file:

1. a. The scanning procedure that entails using hardware equipment to transform the page from a physical form to a "brute" electronic form, commonly as a Tagged Image File Format (TIFF).

The perfect pages have nicely contoured letters at a high size font. Also, they will need to include really small "salt and pepper noise" caused by dust or dirt becoming present on the scanning surface or even the document becoming scanned.

Preferred practice is to use the highest resolution feasible (minimum 300 dots per inch - abbreviation dpi) when scanning the document/page.

b. Not all image files with text in them are obtained from the possibility above. Occasionally the user desires to make a snapshot of his screen and to method the text from the resulted snapshot.

In this case, the ideal practice is in most cases to have a minimum resolution of 600 dpi, the image has to be monochrome and zoomed if doable.

2. After the image file is obtained the next step is to method the image file in order to acquire a greater good quality therefore ensuring a greater detection rate in the next phase of the transformation.

For this, obviously, an image editor is required. Some of the functions that should be present in the image editor would be:

- different filters to deskew, despekle, remove the background noise

- fundamental tools for image editing like zoom, rotate left&right, section choice, etc

- the possibility to generate batches of files in order to automate the procedure when a large number of image files is required to be processed.

3. The most imperative step is when the magic occurs: the extraction of the text from the image as editable text.

At this step, the user must have the possibility to pick out between several possibilities in order to strengthen the detection rate like autocorrection, or to just basically convert the frequent TIFF file into one more format and save it for further use.

4. Following obtaining the editable text it is the time for it to be processed and to be formatted as the user desires. In this case, naturally, an ideal OCR software program should include a text editor that can handle the export to several file formats like PDF, doc/docx, xls/xlsx, rtf, odt, xml, html etc.