What Businesses Need to Know Before Switching to AI-Enhanced OCR

Many businesses find it challenging to deal with paper documents. That is why they have decided to consider digital transformation. However, it takes several hours to transform data manually from papers into digital platforms. This tedious process also affects your team’s productivity and increases the risk of errors. To avoid this problem, you can invest in AI-driven OCR software that improves your document processing efficiency. Let’s discuss AI OCR in detail and help you leverage its benefits.

What is OCR and AI?

Before exploring AI-powered OCR, you need to check a comparative view of OCR vs AI.

Artificial Intelligence understands and interprets data to provide a particular context. It also works with natural language and machine learning to detect patterns and semantics. What’s more, it is capable of managing unstructured documents by recognizing their structure and obtaining information.

Optical Character Recognition technology is intended for successful image conversion into editable text. It also closes the gap between digital platforms and paper-based documents. However, traditional OCR comes with a few demerits that cause inconvenience.

Standard OCR can identify text only when basic fonts are used. For this reason, you need to use modern AI OCR solutions and avoid these limitations.

Why should your business use AI-powered OCR?

AI-powered OCR implementation will benefit your business in several ways-

Save time and gain efficiency

Manual data entry is a time-consuming process and causes human errors. But, AI-based OCR saves your data entry time and prevents errors. Besides, it recognizes characters accurately, no matter what font style and language are used. So, businesses dealing with highly stylized documents can take advantage of the advanced OCR software.

Process complex documents

AI-based OCR systems are not just for text extraction; they are capable of processing non-text elements, such as tables, logos, and signatures. Thus, when your business documents contain visual data, AI-based OCR is the best solution.

Self-learning potential

Innovative AI OCR is capable of learning something from new data. When processing documents, it adapts and improves its performance. Thus, self-learning ability leads to more accurate data extraction. Businesses dealing with different types of documents will benefit from this software.

Help with real-time processing

AI-driven OCR software facilitates real-time document processing. So, if you need to process time-sensitive information, use this application. For instance, the healthcare and finance industries often depend on OCR for data extraction.

How does AI-driven OCR work?

An OCR system comes with software and hardware that scan the paper-based document and translate the content into a code for data processing. In other words, OCR technology is the most significant factor in processing the document, but AI has been integrated with it for effective performance. Let us discuss how the AI-integrated OCR system works.

Preprocess the image

At the first step, hardware processes physical papers into an image. The main purpose of the system is to ensure an accurate rendering; however, it also eliminates potential distortions. The output image turns into its black and white version, leading to the recognition of dark and light areas. The image is then categorized into different elements (like text and tables).

Recognize intelligent characters

Artificial Intelligence identifies the image’s dark areas for number and letter recognition. In most cases, AI targets a single block of text or word at a time using different methods-

Pattern identification– AI algorithms are trained on various text formats and handwritings. They can compare the scanned image and the characters learned.

Feature extraction– The algorithm works based on new rules to find new characters. Features comprise a number of horizontal and angled lines in a character.

After recognizing the characters, the machine helps with a conversion to an ASCII code, which allows for more manipulations.

Start post-processing

In the final step, AI technology corrects errors in your file. It happens because AI has learned the lexicon of words in the document. This restricts the output to particular formats or words to ensure proper interpretations.

Does AI OCR have challenges?

Although AI OCR is advantageous, industries like finance are concerned about sensitive information. Mishandling sensitive data can result in penalties and loss of business reputation. Moreover, some AI OCR solutions cannot process dialects and ancient languages that are not included in the training datasets.

Conclusion

AI-powered OCR is a powerful tool for several businesses that need to reduce manual efforts and improve efficiency. Using this technology, they can digitize document processing. However, AI is combined with other technologies, such as Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning for better speed and accuracy.