Optical character recognition has been applied to a number
of applications. Some of them have been explained below.
A. Invoice Imaging
Invoice imaging [2] is widely used in many businesses
applications to keep track of financial records and prevent a
backlog of payments from piling up. In government agencies
and independent organizations, OCR simplifies data
collection and analysis, among other processes. As the
technology continues to develop, more and more applications
are found for OCR technology, including increased use of
handwriting recognition. Furthermore, other technologies
related to OCR, such as barcode recognition, are used daily in
retail and other industries.
B. Legal Industry
Legal industry [2] is also one of the beneficiaries of the
OCR technology. OCR is used to digitize documents, and
directly entered to computer database. Legal professionals
can further search documents required from huge databases
by simply typing a few keywords.
C. Banking
Another important application of OCR is in banking [2],
where it is used to process cheques without human
involvement. A cheque can be inserted into a machine where
the system scans the amount to be issued and the correct
amount of money is transferred. This technology has nearly
been perfected for printed checks, and is fairly accurate for
handwritten checks as well reducing the waiting time in
banks.