Do you have an image of handwritten notes, and do you want to digitize them? Do you want to extract a quotation from a photo or graphical design? In this case, you can rely on OCR technology, a faster and easier way to extract text from images.
Reading something manually and converting it into your own words takes quite an effort and time. But with the Optical Recognition Technology (OCR), you can save hours of effort. It helps convert documents in complex form or graphical images into editable text.
This article will guide you on extracting editable text from an image by mentioning two different methods. We will also describe how OCR works and the benefits of image-to-text conversion.
How Does OCR Technology Work?
OCR analyzes the patterns of light and dark that bring the combination of letters and numbers to transfer scanned images or graphics into text.
This technology is powered by Artificial Intelligence and NLP-based algorithms, which are trained to bring results within seconds.
The OCR technology is further improved to scan even the low-resolution or blurred images to reduce the chances of errors. Now let’s talk about different ways to extract editable text from a photo by following two different methods.
Extracting Editable Text from an Image
Here we have mentioned the most prominent ways to convert images to editable text with the help of two efficient tools. These tools can be accessed from smartphones and desktop systems as well.
- Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft OneNote is a digital program that comes preinstalled with your Microsoft Office Suite. From the description and name, it only seems like a note-taking editor. But it features a program to scan handwritten text powered by OCR technology.
Extracting Text from a Single Image
- Right-click on the imported image and a pop-up menu will appear.
- Click on the “Copy Text from Picture” option. This command will allow you to extract text from that image.l
- Now click where you would like to paste the image text and press the CTRL+V buttons.
- The text from that image will appear on the screen. You can edit or save it in any form.
Extracting Text from Multiple Scanned Pages
You can follow these steps to extract editable text from multiple images if you have a multi-page printout as a scanned document.
- Right-click on any of the images.
- Click on the option “Copy Text from All the Pages of the Printout.” This option will copy text from all the pages with one click.
- Now click on any plain document where you want to paste the text and press the CTRL+V buttons.
- The text from all the images will appear on the screen in editable form.
- Microsoft Office Lens
This tool is in the form of a mobile application that works with your smartphone’s rear-facing camera. Download the Office Lens on your device to begin the image-to-text conversion process and follow these steps.
- Open the OCR mobile application, navigate the shutter button, and select the “Document” option to open your phone’s back camera lens.
- Now point the camera lens towards the document you want to scan.
- Try to get a clear shot of the document or image you’re scanning by aligning the corners of the document with the frame of the camera interface. Enable the flash option if needed.
- A hovering frame will appear on the screen, bordering each side of the document. Tap the shutter button once the camera frame borders the document.
- The crop or fine-tune the document image if needed. Once you are done editing, MS Office Lens will ask to export the document in several formats. Select Word, and the app will convert the scanned document into an editable DOCX file.
Microsoft Word will automatically open once you export the file in DOCX format. You can edit, save, or share the document any way you want.
- Using OCR Tool to Extract Editable Text
As we have discussed above, various online tools are available to extract text from image. However, an image to text converter should support user-friendly options to simplify the text extraction process, as defined in the following steps.
- Upload an image you want to scan from the local storage using the “Browse” option.
- You can also upload an image by link or from cloud storage like Google Drive.
- Now click on the “Submit” button to begin the scanning process.
The extracted text will be stated in the output box within a few seconds. You can copy it directly or download it as an editable text file.
Benefits of Using OCR Technology
OCR has been around for decades and has sufficiently improved since the influence of Artificial Intelligence.
The OCR technology has become more productive and efficient in scanning complex equations and languages. This technology can benefit workplaces, businesses, and education sectors in the following ways.
- Automated workflow by saving time.
- Attains higher accuracy for scanning text from documents.
- Some OCR software has built-in grammar checkers, which remove any errors.
- Turn notes, receipts, ID cards, and infographics into editable forms.
- Improves efficiency of data entry operators.
Conclusion
The image-to-text conversion can take a while to do by you. It can cause eye strain to read and write each sentence from an image into a Word file. But with the help of OCR online, you can extract editable text from any image in a matter of seconds.
With the help of AI and NLP technology, the OCR tools are further improvements to scan proper structure and tables from images into editable form. We hope our guidelines were helpful enough to assist you in the image-to-text conversion.