Transforming images into words: optical character recognition solutions for image text extraction

Abstract

Optical character recognition (OCR) tool is a boon and greatest advancement in today’s emerging technology which has proven its remarkability in recent years by making it easier for humans to convert the textual information in images or physical documents into text data making it useful for analysis, automation processes and improvised productivity for different purposes. This paper presents the designing, development and implementation of a novel OCR tool aiming at text extraction and recognition tasks. The tool incorporates advanced techniques such as computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) which offer powerful performance for various document types. The performance of the tool is subject to metrics like analysis, accuracy, speed, and document format compatibility. The developed OCR tool provides an accuracy of 98.8% upon execution providing a character error rate of 2.4% and word error rate (WER) of 2.8%. OCR tool finds its applications in document digitization, personal identification, archival of valuable documents, processing of invoices, and other documents. OCR tool holds an immense amount of value for researchers, practitioners and many organizations which seek effective techniques for relevant and accurate text extraction and recognition tasks.