ICR Is Definitely A Blessing!
Are you tired of retyping into a text format any document that has no soft copy or is handwritten? Well, if this is a big problem to you, you better take a look at ICR or Intelligent Character Recognition. The good thing about ICR is that it reduces the burden of going through the retyping process since it will simply scan the said document and convert it to a text document right away. Now, how does this exactly work? What if it cannot read the said document the right way and show an exactly different sentence? What are its positive sides and negative sides? We will discover all these and more as we move along in this article.

First of all, ICR works in the same way that out picture scanner works. There is equipment that allows the scanning of the document as an image. The ICR running inside the computer will then make it possible to read the characters in the document and convert it into a text file. With this, the image is now a document that you can edit, format, and save. You no longer need to retype everything and go through the steps all over again.

However, the down side of this ICR is that it will only work if the material being scanned has clear and dark prints. This means that if it can hardly read the characters in the said image, it will not interpret the right thing. Instead, it will read otherwise. An example of this would be an extremely old document saying ‘A happy girl.’ If the said document is already very vague due to age, it might not distinguish one character from another. Thus, you might be surprised to read it as ‘A hamy girh.’ It interprets whatever is the closest letter that it could read out of the given sentence. This problem is not only true for very old documents, but for handwritten documents as well. Of course, not all penmanship can be considered perfect, clean, and readable. If human beings have a hard time looking at these characters, how much more for this ICR?

Well, this is no longer the case for modern ICR being used. At this point in time, you can now make use of neural networks. If before, ICR is strict in reading the image and is somehow limited, today, it is now possible to have a variety. This means that if the letter ‘A’ is written in different ways, it can still read it as letter ‘A’. Actually, the old version is called as OCR or the Optical Character Recognition. Yet, this modern technique is more deserving of the term ICR. It has neural networks working inside it which is very keen in detecting variations in every letter and utilizes allowances in order to still read the same letter as is.

There are so many ways in which ICR has been a very big help. You might not see it in your day to day living, but for people who have to deal with these issues; this ICR is really a blessing to them. For those who work with postal services where mails are even handwritten; ICR is a big gift. For those who also have important documents that need to be brought to life again, this is also a very essential thing.

Well, you just have to be thankful that ICR is continually being developed in order for it to serve the best for the people.