eBrief Ready platform deploys the use of OCR, which stands for Optical Character Recognition. This is a form of AI and as technology allows a computer to recognize and convert different types of text (such as handwritten or printed text) from images, scanned documents, or PDFs into machine-readable text.
In the legal profession, the primary use of OCR is to enhance scans of documents, so they are searchable.
Here's how it works:
- Image Capture: A document or image is scanned or photographed.
- Preprocessing: The image is cleaned up, with adjustments made for contrast, rotation, and noise removal to make the text clearer.
- Character Recognition: The OCR software analyses the shapes of characters in the image and matches them to predefined fonts or patterns it recognizes, effectively "reading" the text.
- Post-processing: The software might correct errors and output the text into a usable format (like a Word document or text file).