Free OCR Scanning

Martin — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:41:16 +0000

If you are looking for an online service that offers free OCR scanning then you might want to point your web browser to the Free Online OCR service. The service allows users to upload images that will then be processed immediately. The OCR scanning does not take longer than a few seconds after uploading the image. Results are immediately shown in a text form on the same page from where they can be copied and pasted into other software programs or services.

The free OCR scanning service supports PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF or BMP files with a maximum file size of two Megabytes. The OCR currently supports the six languages English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch.

Best results are achieved if the images have a dpi setting of at least 150. That’s problematic when taking screenshots as these usually are taken at a lower value.

Results range from impressive to workable and it is a good idea to check the recognized text and correct any errors made during the OCR scan. Free OCR has a few additional limitations that are mentioned in the faq on the website. Probably the two biggest restrictions are a one page limitation when scanning pdf documents and that it will not recognize document layouts which means that a two column layout will be processed as a single column layout.

The developers of Free OCR promised to update their service in the near future to remove these restrictions and limitations. Thanks go to JoJo for sending in the tip.

Tags: documents, free ocr, images, ocr, ocr scanner, ocr scanning, ocr service, online service

OCR Document Scanning With Smartphones

Martin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:07:56 +0000

The common way to scan documents is to use a hardware scanner to do so and a text recognition software afterwards using optical character recognition (ocr). The advent of digital cameras and smartphones created alternative means for OCR document scanning. A good enough digital camera is capable of photographing the document which can then be processed by OCR software programs like TOP OCR.

TOP OCR processes images of documents that have either been taken by scanners, digital cameras or smartphones. It basically allows to emulate the usual document scanning that is done by a hardware scanner with images taken by digital cameras instead.

The software ocr application will process images that get loaded into the software program by the user of the computer system. It will display the scanned document in the left window and the text that has been processed by the OCR document scanning in the right window. The software developers of the OCR software are recommending at least a 3 Megapixel camera to take the image of the document. They have setup a tutorial page with many helpful tips on getting the best results.

The OCR document scanning process itself takes only a few seconds per page. Results are instantly shown in the right window which offers basic text editing capabilities to correct any errors in the automatic text recognition process.

The OCR part of the software program is providing basic image manipulation features like rotating the scanned images or changing the image contrast. TOP OCR is a multi-lingual OCR software program for the Windows operating system that produces impressive results if the source image is of good quality.

Tags: digital camera, document scanning, ocr, ocr scanning, ocr software, smartphones, text recognition, top ocr, windows software

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