What is ICR?
ICR stands for intelligent character recognition. While many people might be familiar with OCR for printed text, fewer people might know about ICR, a related software type for handwritten text. ICR makes it possible to transform any scanned document into a text file, and it no longer limits document automation to the processing of printed documents. With ICR, the leap from a paper document to a digital file becomes much smaller.
The complexity of handwriting recognition
Handwriting recognition requires algorithms that are much more complex than OCR algorithms, due to the nature of the text being processed. Handwriting varies significantly from one user to another, and even though printed fonts vary as well, the difference is much greater for handwriting. For this reason, the accuracy of ICR has not yet reached the same levels that OCR software has attained. While a good OCR tool can be over 99 percent accurate, ICR accuracy is about 97 percent at best. However, this is still extremely impressive, especially when considering that fact that manual data entry for handwritten information is far from perfect as well.
ICR applied to document automation
The main use of ICR has been to automate the processing of structured forms. ICR enables document automation programs to recognize handwritten text and extract information, bypassing data entry entirely. When documents are automated, new documents are entered into the computer system using scanning and automatic information extraction. In order for this to happen, handwritten text needs to be readable by the computer. ICR addresses this issue by identifying text characters. Thus, ICR makes it possible to automate a wide range of forms.
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