What is ICR?

ICR stands for Intelligent Character Recognition, which is an extension and advancement of existing OCR technology. While OCR is restricted to computer-printed text, ICR is capable of recognizing handwritten text. This is useful because many documents and printed forms contain sections that are filled out by hand, and these sections could not be processed using traditional OCR technology. The variation among individual handwriting styles was so great that human labor was required to read the documents and retype the information into electronic format. This placed severe limitations on the nature of information that could be processed automatically.

With the development of ICR, handwriting recognition is no longer a problem. ICR has not yet reached the near-perfect accuracy of OCR technology, but it is very effective, sometimes attaining accuracy rates of over 97%. Like any character recognition technology, ICR depends on the clarity of the text being processed, which can be a problem for individuals with messy handwriting.

ICR is an especially useful component of forms processing software, which handles standardized forms. While some information can be entered by computer, many forms are filled out by hand, and so handwriting recognition is essential. Surveys, medical forms, and applications can all be processed automatically with the help of ICR software, speeding up the process tremendously and allowing workers to focus on other tasks. Rather than being used to make long documents text-searchable, ICR is commonly used to extract text from specified fields within a form. This helps maximize the effectiveness of the software by indicating the areas on which it must focus.

While ICR is only capable of recognizing printed handwritten text, it is being expanded through the development of a new technology called IWR (Intelligent Word Recognition) to recognize cursive writing. This would add even more flexibility, allowing almost any paper document to be processed electronically. Overall, ICR has become a popular tool across many companies and organizations, and continues to gain popularity as the technology improves.