Note: This content was updated on 8/4/2025 to reflect new details about AI-enhanced OCR.
Note: This content was updated on 8/4/2025 to reflect new details about AI-enhanced OCR.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that converts different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files, or images captured by a digital camera, into editable and searchable data. By using OCR, businesses can extract text from these documents, making it easier to manage, store, and access information.
OCR technology mimics the human ability to recognize text by scanning each character on a page, recognizing them as letters and punctuation marks, and converting them into machine-encoded text. This process involves several stages:
Image Preprocessing: Enhancing the quality of the scanned image to improve recognition accuracy.
Character Recognition: Identifying individual characters using pattern recognition or feature detection algorithms.
Post-Processing: Correcting errors and formatting the recognized text to match the original document’s layout.
OCR enables businesses to make their scanned documents searchable, allowing users to quickly find the information they need within a document, saving time and improving productivity.
By converting scanned documents into text, OCR technology enables screen readers to read the content aloud, making it easier for visually impaired individuals to access information.
Digitizing paper documents using OCR reduces costs associated with physical storage, printing, and document retrieval. Additionally, it helps streamline document workflows, reducing the need for manual data entry and increasing efficiency.
OCR can extract key data from documents, such as names, addresses, and invoice numbers, which can then be used for various purposes, such as populating databases or automating data entry tasks.
The technology has significantly improved in accuracy over the years, reducing errors in document conversion and ensuring that the converted digital documents are reliable and accurate.
Levelpath leverages advanced OCR technology to provide high-accuracy document processing solutions. Our system is trained on millions of documents to achieve the greatest accuracy in the market, supporting over a hundred different languages and handwriting recognition.
Levelpath’s OCR technology is integral to our Contracts app, which streamlines contract management processes. By converting static contracts into searchable and editable digital documents, businesses can efficiently manage, organize, and store all contracts in a centralized repository accessible from any device.
Our technology automates the extraction of critical contract data, such as contract parties, values, and deadlines. This automation reduces the need for manual data entry, allowing procurement and business teams to focus on high-value tasks.
With OCR, businesses can confidently manage supplier contracts and documents, ensuring compliance and mitigating risks. The centralized storage of contract data simplifies audit preparation and provides complete visibility to auditors.
The future of OCR lies in its integration with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. These advancements will further improve accuracy and enable more advanced document processing capabilities. As businesses increasingly adopt cloud-based document management solutions, OCR is expected to become more accessible and scalable, allowing organizations of all sizes to benefit from its advantages.
OCR has improved over time in translating documents into digital files, but AI can render digital documents more accurately to avoid accidental typos or misunderstandings. More importantly, AI also provides Levelpath with the ability to quickly analyze documents, which is used for contract metadata extraction and discovery. For OCR, Levelpath is an important step for quickly translating documents of all types into intelligent insights.
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Watch IBM Master Inventor, Martin Keen, explain the evolution and how OCR works.