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Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in AI: an underestimated technique?

Written by
Daniella
Published on
2024-05-03
Reading time
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min
πŸ“˜ CONTENTS
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OCR (Optical Character Recognition)Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a discreet but omnipresent keystone in the world of artificial intelligence. This seemingly simple process relies on complex algorithms capable of recognizing and interpreting characters present in a database of digitized documents or images. This technique is so powerful, and now so widespread, that it can be found in our smartphones: you may have noticed that it is now possible to copy/paste numbers or characters from a simple photo taken with the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy?

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By transforming visual elements into textual data, OCR opens up new perspectives in visual data analysis and data annotation tasks.

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What is OCR?

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Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology for converting physical documents containing text into editable electronic files. First, a document is scanned using a scanner or camera. Integrated algorithms then analyze the image to recognize the printed characters.

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Once the characters have been identified, OCR converts them into editable text, usually in a file format such as Word or PDF. This technology is widely used to convert paper documents into electronic files. The aim is to facilitate their storage by integrating them into a database, so that they can be searched or edited.

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OCR - Label Studio
An overview of Label Studio, one of the world's most popular and powerful data annotation platforms

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What makes OCR so important?

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The importance of OCR is reflected in its many uses, including :

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Document digitization and preservation

As mentioned above, OCR enables paper documents to be converted into electronic formats, facilitating their long-term storage and preservation. This helps preserve important, historical documents that might otherwise deteriorate over time.

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Accessibility

OCR makes the content of printed documents accessible to the visually impaired or blind. In particular, it enables text to be converted into formats that can be read by speech synthesis software or Braille displays.

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Content research and analysis

Once text is converted into electronic format, it becomes easier to search, sort and analyze. This makes it easier to find specific information in large sets of documents. This can be extremely useful in fields such as academic, legal, medical or commercial research.

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What makes OCR so important (if sometimes underestimated) in the AI era?

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In the AI era, OCR becomes even more important due to the technological advances that accompany it, including:

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Integration into automated workflows

Integrating OCR into AI-powered systems makes it possible to automate tasks such as classifying documents, extracting text or other information, and performing data processing. This can speed up business processes, reduce human error and free up time for more strategic tasks.

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Training AI models

OCR data can be used to train AI models. This is the case, for example, with models for natural language processing (NLP) models, to improve text comprehension and generation.

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Analysis of unstructured data

A lot of valuable information can be found in unstructured documents such as reports, contracts, forms, ... OCR makes this data accessible for analysis by AI algorithms. This opens up new possibilities for data-driven decision-making and innovation.

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How does OCR shape data annotation tasks?

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For many use cases, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) plays an active role in shaping data annotation tasks. Here are just a few examples:

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Data pre-processing

In many data annotation projects, the input data may be scanned documents containing text. Before carrying out the actual annotation, it is often necessary to pre-process this data using OCR to extract text from the images. This creates an electronic version of the text to be annotated, facilitating the annotation process for the annotators or AI algorithms.

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Data enhancement

OCR can be used to expand data sets by converting non-text documents into extracted text. This increases the variety and quantity of data available for training AI models. At the same time, it can improve the performance of these models.

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Validation and correction of annotations

When human annotators are working on annotation tasks, OCR can be used to validate or correct the annotations produced. For example, if an annotator has incorrectly annotated part of the text in an image, OCR can be used to check whether the extracted text matches the annotation. This can help guarantee the quality of annotated data.

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Improving efficiency

By using OCR to extract text from images, annotation tasks can be made more efficient. Rather than asking annotators to manually enter the text to be annotated, they can concentrate on the specific annotation task. This is an excellent way of speeding up the overall data processing process.

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Adapting to specific needs

OCR can be tailored to meet the specific needs of annotation tasks. For example, in the case of documents containing particular languages or fonts, customized OCR models can be developed to improve the accuracy of text extraction. This is particularly important in data-quality-sensitive annotation projects (i.e., the vast majority of projects!).

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How did the first OCR systems pave the way for today's technology?

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The first OCR systems laid the foundations for the development of today's technology. They overcame many technical challenges and introduced fundamental concepts that continue to be used today.

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Rule-based character recognition

Early OCR systems often used rule-based approaches to character recognition. These approaches involved defining specific rules for recognizing character shapes based on characteristics such as stroke size, shape and arrangement.

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Although these methods were limited in terms of accuracy and ability to handle a variety of fonts, they laid the foundations for further developments in the field.

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Statistical models

Later, OCR systems began to use statistical models to improve the accuracy of character recognition. These models were trained on large amounts of data to learn the characteristics of characters and words in different contexts.

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This approach has considerably improved the accuracy of optical character recognition, particularly in environments where fonts and writing styles can vary.

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Using neural networks

Recent advances in deep learning have led to the adoption of neural networks for character recognition. These neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance in text recognition. This is particularly true of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs).

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These models have considerably improved OCR accuracy and made it possible to handle a wide variety of fonts and writing styles. This, using deep architectures and advanced training techniques on large amounts of data.

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Adaptation to specific data

Modern OCR systems often incorporate mechanisms for adapting to specific data to improve recognition accuracy. This can include training OCR models on data specific to a particular domain or language. It also includes the use of continuous adaptation techniques to adjust models according to new data observed in production scenarios.

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Beyond document digitization, what other applications is OCR revolutionizing?

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Beyond the simple digitization of documents, OCR brings significant innovations to many other applications.

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Automatic translation

OCR is often used in combination with machine translation systems to translate printed documents into different languages. By first converting the text into electronic format using OCR, machine translation systems can then translate the text into the desired language.

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Information extraction

OCR can be used to extract specific information from documents, such as invoices, forms or receipts. For example, in accounting, OCR can be used to automatically extract amounts, dates and other relevant information from scanned invoices. This can speed up data processing considerably.

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Text recognition in images and videos

OCR can also be used to extract text from images or videos. videos. This is useful in cases where it may be necessary to search for specific text in video recordings. Or in the automatic recognition of license plates from surveillance camera images.

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What new frontiers could OCR cross in the years to come?

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In the years to come, OCR could break new ground thanks to the rapid evolution of technology, and in particular artificial intelligence. At the time of writing, AI development techniques are being renewed almost every 2 weeks! Integration with other fields of artificial intelligence and computer science may also have a role to play.

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Advanced handwriting recognition

Advances in image processing and machine learning techniques could enable more accurate recognition of handwritten documents. Even under difficult conditions, such as varying handwriting styles, damaged documents or languages with complex characters.

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Multimodal recognition

Integrating OCR with other sensory modalities could enable more robust and contextually rich multimodal recognition. This could include object recognition in images, speech recognition and natural language understanding. This would open up new possibilities in areas such as augmented reality, autonomous cars and intelligent user interfaces.

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OCR based on Deep Learning

The use of deep neural network architectures and deep learning techniques could significantly improve OCR accuracy. Especially in challenging scenarios such as recognizing documents with varied fonts, non-Latin languages and complex scripts.

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Real-time OCR

Advances in image processing technologies and hardware architectures could enable the deployment of real-time OCR on mobile devices and embedded systems. This would open up new possibilities in applications such as augmented reality (VR), real-time translation and visual assistance for the visually impaired or blind.

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Adaptive, self-learning OCR

OCR could become more adaptive and self-learning. This could be achieved by using continuous learning techniques to automatically adapt to new document types, languages and writing styles. This could lead to greater generalizability and robustness of OCR in a variety of environments.

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Protection of privacy and data security

With the increasing use of OCR to process sensitive documents, there is likely to be a growing emphasis on the development of privacy and data security techniques. This is to ensure that confidential information, such as medical, financial or legal information, is not compromised during the recognition process.

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Conclusion

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OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a technology that transforms printed documents into editable text. It opens up a wide range of practical applications. By analyzing document images, OCR identifies and converts characters into digital text, facilitating research, translation and process automation.

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Although it may face various technical challenges, such as recognition accuracy and language variability, OCR continues to evolve thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and image processing. As a result, OCR promises to make printed information more accessible, manipulable and usable than ever before.