Have you ever stared at a pile of scanned documents with important handwritten notes scribbled across them, wishing you could magically transform that information into editable text?
Well, those days of frustration are over thanks to recent advances Handwriting OCR technology.
This blog will show you exactly how you can unlock the hidden value within your documents. Learn how to scan handwriting to text easily, convert them into digital text, and finally integrate that data seamlessly into your business systems.
Get ready to recognize all handwritten information and streamline your operations!
Get this case study to see how a leader in the insurance industry accelerated their process with OCR and AI to save significant money and time. Learn how Grooper's AI and handwriting OCR technology streamlines your workflows, saves costs, and makes your staff more productive!
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Technically, "optical character recognition (OCR)" is the incorrect term when dealing with handwriting. But we're going to treat it the same because the lines between OCR and "Intelligent Character Recognition" (ICR) have been blurred by the latest AI-enabled cloud-based OCR engines.
However, these newer OCR engines (or models) can recognize machine print and hand-written text. With Grooper software, we've figured out their strengths and weaknesses, and we help OCR engines where they are weak and enhance them where they are strong to get industry-best results.
Before 2021, the only kind of handwriting that could be reliably extracted was constrained handprint inside boxes. Back then, no OCR techniques worked well to get any other form of handwriting in documents.
In those situations, we advised setting up a solid Key-From-Image solution that allowed the rapid data entry of handwritten data.
But today, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) software such as Grooper can read virtually any form of handwriting. It can recognize and extract unconstrained or cursive handwriting on documents that also have machine print on them, as you will see in this blog.
While OCR scanning is a manual task, converting handwriting is done automatically in the background.
A good, clean scanned document is one of the biggest factors in producing great OCR results. While Grooper supports document scanners directly (through TWAIN and ISIS drivers), most documents these days are already scanned.
If you have paper, select a good-quality document scanner. Cheap scanners from "big box" stores do not produce high-quality images. The reasons are way beyond the scope of this blog, but you need to invest in decent scanning hardware as your first step.
We resell several different scanners from different, well-respected scanner manufacturers, like Canon, Kodak, Fujitsu (Ricoh), Visioneer (Kodak), and more.
Regardless of the scanner type, you want high-quality images by adjusting two main settings:
Grooper and all these fancy new OCR engines need more data to make better decisions. So a scan at 300 DPI at full color will yield better results than a black-and-white (also called "bi-tonal") 300 DPI image.
Don't worry about storing these big, color images. Grooper will export the quality image you want—we can make the image much smaller after OCR has been successfully performed.
Handwriting recognition systems like Grooper do this step for you. Just check the image quality in the Grooper Scan module:
But that's it. The document is automatically converted from paper to electronic form by Grooper.
Grooper then runs OCR in several different forms on the document(s) and creates text versions of each document.
If you are just trying to convert handwritten documents to a full-text documents, then you're finished.
Grooper will export a full-text PDF of your document with the handwriting now searchable by any PDF viewer and a lot of systems directly. Grooper can also export just the text to a file system or any other business system that can accept external data.
IWR finds and extracts handwritten text and cursive handwriting. IWR examines entire words and phrases, while ICR focuses on individual characters.
IWR was created to be used only on free-form documents or where text was handwritten in data sections that are hard to recognize.
But it's safe to say that the more handwriting a document has, the greater the need for quality handprint OCR. Here are just a few common business uses for OCR handwriting:
But with Grooper's API connectivity to separate OCR engines, it was able to easily recognize all styles of text with no software add-ons purchased. Once extracted, this data can be exported to financial data systems or downstream business workflows.
This is a vast improvement over traditional methods that rely on manual work to key in this data off documents.
With other document OCR solutions, you will have to purchase an add-on module to recognize the MICR font for the account number.
Normally, this is data you would never be able to find in a data repository. Without a very capable OCR software like Grooper, the only way you can get this data into your repository is through hand transcribing.
But with a solution like Grooper, this data can be recognized, extracted, dumped into a database, and easily found with a text search.
We know many companies have been scanning documents for over 20 years, but haven't used handwriting OCR on them yet. A company can now use this technology to learn more about itself. For instance, does it has any legal liabilities that it was unaware of?
However...our document processing software Grooper can still help you out even when the scans are bad. Or even terrible, like in this example.
With all the noise in this scan, other handwriting OCR software will incorrectly recognize this text and as a result, generates a large amount of junk text. But Grooper was able to drop out all gray shading, OCR the machine text and handwriting, and recognize the text accurately.
Also, it intelligently looked past the crossed out name (Leslie Reid) and accurately recognized that data.
In this example, a potential customer didn't have a business card, so they just wrote their contact information on paper. Not only was our document processing solution (Grooper) able to convert the handprint into clean digital text — but ChatGPT OCR was then able to read everything.
How? GPT engines like ChatGPT need clean text. And Grooper is designed to extract clean text.
But here are several tips that can help you get the best and most accurate handwriting recognition for things like OCR invoice processing or OCR accounts payable:
Get this guide and use their expertise to make the best buying decision in a Handwriting OCR software!