What is optical character recognition (OCR)?

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:

  1. Image Capture: A document or image is scanned or photographed.
  2. Preprocessing: The image is cleaned up, with adjustments made for contrast, rotation, and noise removal to make the text clearer.
  3. 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.
  4. Post-processing: The software might correct errors and output the text into a usable format (like a Word document or text file).