It’s pretty easy to take words on your computer screen and put them on a physical sheet of paper, just use the printer. But going in the opposite direction, scanning printed information into your PC is quite a bit trickier. Flatbed scanners aren’t difficult to operate, but many of them are basically just taking a picture of the document and saving it onto your PC, so it probably does not look very crisp but due to file compression but also you can’t edit a clean copy of your document in your favorite word processor because the scanner won’t recognize each character.
Fortunately, there are many devices out there that enable optical character recognition — OCR where each character on a page is scanned individually so your papers are uploaded as actual text documents instead of messy JPEGs. But how exactly does that work and is one kind of optical scanner better than another?
History of OCR
Because the whole concept of translating the text into the electronic signal is pretty broad. There have been lots of different implementations of OCR over the years. One of the earliest electric OCR devices the optophone was invented in 1914, this bizarre-looking contraption relied on the special behavior of selenium which conducts electricity differently in light and darkness as it scanned the words on a page. The optophone distinguished between the dark ink of text and lighter blank spaces generating tones that correspond to different letters, making it possible for blind people to read with some practice. Later in 1931, a machine was developed that could convert printed text to telegraph code. One of the first technologies to translate printed characters to electrical impulses rather than sounds. But it wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s that OCR began to take a more familiar modern form with postal services using OCR to read addresses and software that could recognize many different fonts.
How does OCR operate?
So back to the present day when you scan a document, how exactly does the software know what it’s looking at? The first step is to cut out artifacts so your OCR program can concentrate on the text and nothing else. So it attempts to remove dust and other various graphics, align the text properly and convert any colors or shades of gray in the image to black and white only, making the words themselves easier to recognize. The next step is to figure out which characters are on the page. Simpler forms of OCR compare each scanned letter pixel by pixel to a known database of fonts and decide on the closest match. Smarter OCR however takes this step farther by breaking down each character into constituent elements like curves and corners and looking for matching physical features and actual letters. You can think of the differences between these two approaches similar to the difference between raster and vector images.
Improvement of OCR
OCR software can also make use of a dictionary so it won’t accidentally spit out nonsense words due to inaccurate scanning. For example, if your scanner sees a blurred word but it can’t quite tell, it can check its dictionary to decide that the word. Giving OCR software situational information can further cut down on errors such as telling it to only try to match numbers if it’s reading zip codes on an envelope.
Even with these tricks, however, OCR is not perfect which you’ve probably seen for yourself if you’ve ever used it. But with greater processing power and machine learning techniques that allow the software to recognize more subtle patterns over time, OCR has become versatile enough to recognize harder-to-read typefaces in consistently printed material and even handwriting.
How to use OCR on NEWYES Scan Reader Pen?
The NEWYES Scan Reader Pen can recognize every word you scan using OCR technology. It could recognize 230 English words per minute, afterward, you can save the content and transfer it to your PC using USB. The saved file will be displayed on your computer in the form of text.
How to use OCR on NEWYES application?
With the popularity of smartphones, it seems to be more convenient to save some content by taking a picture. But what if we want to fetch the content in the picture and also edit it? Go to the app store and download an app called NEWYES note, and it will surprise you. There is a Photo Scanning function in the application which it allows you to fetch any word from a photo. Simply just take a photo of your paper and recognize the photo by the app, the words on the photo can be perfectly recognized and copied to your phone as text.
In general, OCR technology is developing rapidly, but it still has a lot to improve. With the development of technology, OCR can be applied in more fields. If you have needs in this area, you can refer to the methods mentioned in the article.
