When is ICR necessary?
Intelligent character recognition is required to automate the recognition of handwritten text. While OCR, or optical character recognition, has the capabilities needed to recognize text in many different fonts, it does not have the flexibility needed to adapt to different handwriting styles. When OCR is not enough, ICR is used to enhance a document automation tool's capabilities to recognize text. ICR is necessary when automatically processing any document or form that contains spaces with handwritten information.
Accuracy of ICR for handwritten text
Some people may question the ability of an automated program to recognize handwritten text accurately, given all of the nuances of different writing styles. However, as the software becomes more advanced, some ICR engines have attained extremely high accuracy, exceeding 97 percent recognition. ICR is known as 'intelligent' because it is able to adjust to different people's handwriting, learning during processing in order to improve accuracy levels. Thus, ICR has already become a more efficient option than the manual entry of handwritten text into a digital database.
Implementing ICR for handwritten text
ICR is implemented in document automation tools whose goal is to process structured documents, such as scanned forms, automatically. Whenever these documents contain handwritten text in addition to printed text, ICR is needed to make the text accessible to the computer. ICR is used in the processing of bank checks, applications, surveys, and any other form with spaces to enter information by and. When using ICR for handwritten text, the documents all need to be scanned, so that the document automation software can take over and process the information within them.
[ Back ]