Data Collection with OCR

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a system that provides a full alphanumeric recognition of printed or handwritten characters at electronic speed by simply scanning the document. More recently, the term Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) has evolved to describe the process of interpreting hand-written data.

Documents containing character images can be scanned through a scanner or through software and then a recognition engine can interpret the images and turn images of handwritten or printed characters into ASCII data (machine-readable characters). Therefore, OCR / ICR allow users to quickly automate data capture from documents and eliminate manual keystrokes.

OCR technology provides complete form processing and document capture solutions. Usually, OCR uses a modular architecture that is open, scaleable, programmable, and sometimes workflow controlled. It includes forms definition, scanning, image pre-processing, and recognition capabilities.

Data Management & Business Intelligence
The primary reason that data are collected from documents with OCR is to create databases that can be queried in order to manage business processes and to view potential business outcomes. BI, or Business Intelligence, provides historical, current, and predictive views of business operations.