What is intelligent character recognition (ICR)?
Intelligent character recognition (ICR) is the recognition of hand-printed characters, as opposed to OCR, which reads machine-printed text. ICR engines are trained on many styles of handwriting and return each character with a confidence score, so software can flag the ones it is unsure of for a person to check.
ICR, OCR and the rest
- OCR reads typed and printed text, and is highly accurate on clean scans.
- ICR reads hand printing, best when each character is written in its own box.
- OMR (optical mark recognition) reads checkboxes and filled bubbles, as on surveys and tests.
- Cursive handwriting is the hardest case, and is usually captured by verifying or keying rather than trusted to recognition alone.
Where ICR is used
Forms processing: applications, surveys, claims, registrations and any paper form people fill in by hand. Accuracy depends heavily on form design, validation rules and a verification step; see ICR forms processing for how to get it right.
Software
ABBYY FlexiCapture combines ICR, OCR and checkbox recognition with validation and verification for complete forms processing; we resell and implement it. For typed and printed forms, zone OCR in SimpleIndex is the lower-cost route. Our OCR consultants can test your forms before you buy.
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