The flow of data never stops. It encompasses and multiplies within any organization. Every organization collects and stores data, but most of it exists in an unstructured form. Through the passage of time, data keeps piling up. Thus, making it really difficult for organizations to extract the relevant information from it.
To overcome this problem, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) was introduced as a way of managing, classifying, and extracting relevant data. IDP is a perspicacious software that apprehends data intelligently. IDP captures data in a certain manner that it is able to recognize data, regardless of being structured or unstructured, depending upon its various tools used for classification.
Tools Used for Classification by IDP Software
Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) – ICR is a technology for grasping hand-written data and converting it into a machine-understandable format. ICR continuously and persistently works upon learning natural language as it involves a neural network, and is able to work more efficiently with a huge amount of information. ICR involves complex technology, contributed by Artificial Intelligence. ICR encapsulates auto-didacticism and is self-instructed to be cognizant of the hand-written natural languages and their disposition within an organization.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – OCR is software that works on capturing data in a printed digital format. For more information on OCR click here.
Intelligent Word Recognition (IWR) – IWR is a subset of Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), which has the capability to understand cursive handwriting. Unlike ICR it does not focus on capturing character, rather it works on engulfing full words and phrases. IWR grasps unstructured data in a more contingent manner. However, IWR cannot replace ICR as it is used for recognizing and processing documents that are not complex and involve a free form.
Barcode Recognition – A software for scanning and acknowledging the barcodes, or machine-readable codes. It is the most common tool used for the classification of data. Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) OMR is software used to pin-point data by spotting out particular markings within a document. It is most commonly used by Examination departments worldwide, to map out the answers for Multiple Choice Questions.
Need For ICR
Many a time data capturing turns out to be a mammoth task and a challenge for many organizations. Only employing an OCR tool is not enough, as it is only able to capture data in a printed form and is restricted to recognizing digitized characters.
However, the maximum percent of data that exists in an organization, exists in a hand-written form. OCR is unable to recognize hand-written or natural text. Capturing hand-written unstructured data involves a much-advanced technology as compared to the digitalized data, used in ICR.
Moreover, ICR is an apex form of OCR and involves the extraction of a huge volume of data with few errors. ICR, being a much more complex and comprehensive document processing tool, is comparatively an expensive technology, but it is the need of the hour as data classification is a very vital part of the proper functioning of any organization.
