Online OCR – Optical Character Recognition

OCR is an acronym for optical character recognition and describes a technique or method for detecting characters inside digital images. Using OCR, the information from these images can easily be digitized without manual inference.

Does Converter App offer Online OCR?

Yes, some of our tools automatically apply OCR to your PDFs, images or DjVu documents if needed. There are two main categories of OCR output by our service: Online OCR with simple text extraction and OCR with document layout reconstruction.

1. OCR with Plain Text Output

The text information from your PDFs or images is extracted and stored in the plain text format without any layout reconstruction. This approach produces simple and clean files that are great for editing and pasting the text to another location. Text output is the best solution if you are only interested in the content and the document layout is not of any importance.

2. OCR with Layout Reconstruction

When choosing this approach, the original document's layout is reconstructed. The output document will look similar to the scanned original. Tables and images show up at their original position. In practice, this process can be quite complex and subject to errors. Therefore, the quality of the output strongly depends on the original material. The simpler the page layout of the original is, the better the resulting quality will be.

The main Benefits of Converter App OCR

Our OCR service is available free of cost. When using it you:

  • Turn hard-copy text into digital text since it is super easier for you to change or edit.
  • Avoid the stress of imputing text and data manually.
  • Add design elements like graphics, images, and more text, if needed.

In general the scope of OCR includes:

  • Scan and recognize text characters in any image, photo, or PDF.
  • Digitize files to machine-readable and searchable data.

How to use the Converter App OCR tools?

  • Step 1: Select a converter and click on the upload link and submit your images or PDF documents to start the OCR process. Alternatively, drag and drop your document or image into the browser's to the upload box and begin the OCR process.
  • Step 2: Lean back and wait until our cloud-based service has completed the job for you. Once done you can download the result for free.

How does Optical Character Recognition work?

Want to know how OCR works? Most modern OCR systems make heavy use of artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies. Here’s how it recognizes and converts your text:

  • Pattern recognition: First, it searches for the fonts of text characters that have been designed into its algorithm.
  • Feature detection: It also detects the distinctive qualities of a certain letter. For example, to know if such a letter is curved or straight. This helps in scanning and converting texts accurately.

Open Source OCR Systems

If you need to run OCR locally on your desktop computer, there are excellent open source OCR systems available on the market. Two examples of open source OCR systems are Tesseract and PaddleOCR. However, getting good results with these systems may require some expertise and tuning, so if there is no particular need for running the OCR engine offline, online converters are the best way to go.