An OCR – Optical Character Recognition is a tool used to convert an image that contains text into a machine-readable text format. OCR technology is a business solution that has helped a lot of business owners by automating data extraction from printed or written text from a scanned document or image file and then converting the text into a machine-readable form to be used for data processing like editing or searching.

Businesses that utilize OCR abilities to transform images and PDFs save time and assets that would otherwise be essential to handle unsearchable data. Once transferred, OCR-processed textual information can be used by businesses more easily and quickly.

The benefits of OCR technology to businesses include:

• Removal of manual data entry
• Resource savings due to the ability to process more data faster and with fewer resources
• Error reductions
• Reallotment of physical storage space
• Improved fecundity

In this article, we shall be looking at the top five OCR APIs you should use for your business.

How does an OCR Work?

OCR recognition allows the transformation of characters through three main steps. They are image preprocessing, character recognition, and post-processing.

Image Preprocessing

This step refers to a series of procedures projected to improve image clarity for better and successful recognition. This step aims to suppress deformations and enhance the vital features in a document or image.

Character Recognition

The character recognition step uses OCR algorithms that allow the device to detect only the needed portions or shapes of a digitized image. When the input data is too large, only a tiny amount will be processed. It guarantees to capture the important parts of a document or image and sorts out the extra components while pledging better text recognition performance.

Post Processing

This step corrects mistakes and guarantees the accuracy of the OCR by using a lexicon, numbers, or accepted codes. This step may also include other techniques, such as using standard colors and business rules.

Why Do Businesses Use The Best OCR SDK Today?

OCR technology has overturned data and storage activities in various fields, including medical fields, human resources, and financial companies. It has also helped to combat common user errors by digitizing and sharing files. OCR technology has many advancements. They are as follows:

• It can facilitate automated data processing and data entry in firms that need to digitize printed data, such as invoices, bank statements, and receipts.
• Can be involved in digitizing historical documents and newspapers to make them searchable.
• Fields like recognition of licence plates by speed cameras and red-light camera software.
• It can also use speech synthesizers for individuals who are unable to speak.
• Generating automated workflows by digitizing PDF documents in various business units.
• Facial recognition of people at borders and other checkpoints.
• In payment processes to ease cross-border transactions.

But the magic doesn’t stop there; almost every sector could benefit enormously from OCR.

Let’s talk about how OCR helps different sectors/business ventures.

How Does an OCR API Help the Healthcare Industry? 

OCR APIs can automate the written text of clinical documentation, past medical history, prescribed medications, and more, thereby saving time. 

Also, prescription slips, lab notebooks, and clinical testing data can be analyzed and changed to digital file types for guaranteed health records management using AI-based OCR technology.

OCR APIs enable healthcare organizations to track multiple fields from various medical records and better hospital patient orientation and training activities. 

Another typical aspect is that these APIs can begin educating patients on their rights, safety concerns, and healthcare treatments available by removing, retrieving, sorting, and organizing diagnostic information.

How Does an OCR API Help Financial Institutions?

OCR technology can obtain commodity, cost, and company data from disbursements, bills, and assets in the retail and supply chain industries. It can recognize invoice layouts and remove functional areas with 95% accuracy.

For receipts, data validation can be done using data capture answers and OCR APIs, and the data can then be translated to Excel/JSON/CSV for evaluation. 

For businesses that want to keep stock on hand and issue pre-orders, invoice observation can help them improve monetary funds and conduct cash flow predictions based on financial statements.

In short, OCR information extraction in purchase orders can help companies gain insight into data. Therefore, we are laying the foundation for better customer experiences by preserving data credibility and integrity.

Top 5 Best OCR API for your Business Need

• Filestack OCR

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is one of the intelligence services of the Filestack platform. Using this service, you can detect both printed and handwritten texts in images. The result follows the standard JSON format, containing all the details regarding detected text areas, lines, and words. Filestack OCR SDK helps digitize documents to extract data without lifting a finger.

Features of Filestack OCR:

• Large feature set 
• Accelerated performance 
• Secure 
• Embedded file viewer
• Support for all accurate data sources

Most businesses are searching for ways to incorporate the best OCR SDK into their systems and applications. One of the best, most effective ways to do this is to use Filestack’s OCR API.

Filestack’s OCR API can help you interpret, extract, and organize data, reduce errors, and increase data collection efficiency. It works on not only images, but also tax documents, business cards, IDs, and invoices.

Moreover, you can transfer image features character-by-character into specialized identification codes. You can do that using FIlestack’s Best OCR SDK, eliminating the hassle of manual data processing.

• Simple OCR SDK

The Simple OCR SDK is suitable for simple, lightweight OCR solutions. While the Simple OCR SDK doesn’t have many features, it is streamlined and fast. It has advanced features, including template matching, character set selection, and auto-rotate.

• Cloudmersive OCR API

The Cloudmersive OCR API is a nifty tool for simple text extraction from images. Firstly, it has only one endpoint – Image to Text – and returns all the text in the image as one string, rather than by regions. Secondly, it can be helpful when transcribing a big blob of text (from a book/paper).

• ABBYY OCR

ABBYY OCR is a complete OCR SDK for document recognition, data capture, and language processing. Through ABBYY’s SDK, developers can process large volumes of documents quickly. The ABBYY OCR is handy for business, paper, and PDF document scanning. However, it is not an ideal solution for OCR with video or complex images. Nevertheless, it is one of the fastest and easiest solutions for clean documents.

• Microsoft Computer Vision

The Microsoft Computer Vision API is a comprehensive set of computer vision tools, spanning capabilities like generating smart image thumbnails, recognizing celebrities in images, and describing the content of images using AI. It has many drawbacks.

Conclusion

Third party solutions offer ready-made solutions when it comes to OCR technology. It makes more business sense to use existing solutions instead of creating new ones. In that case, you can focus more on your product vision.