Image-to-text conversion is a product of OCR technology. OCR stands for “Optical Character Recognition” which is further a product of artificial intelligence. What OCR does is that it enables a machine/computer system to identify and extract text from images. That is impressive because previously, computers were unable to understand that a formation of pixels represents a letter or a character, but with OCR they can. And that is the basis of image-to-text converters/online OCR tools. They are tools that can recognize text in images and extract it into a digitally editable format. Now, how does that function help with data processing? That is what we are here to find out.

How Can Image-to-text Conversion Tools Help with Data Processing

Data processing is a field that deals with the manipulation and transformation of data from raw form into processed, meaningful information. Data processing in the 21st century is huge, with fields like big data emerging due to the sheer quantity of data being processed. That is why the use of tools and technology to facilitate data processing has gained a lot of traction. Now, we will see how image-to-text tools can help with data processing.

1. Helps with Text Data Extraction

This might seem obvious but an image to text converter can help with data extraction. Even though technology has progressed so much, we still have not let go of paper as a medium. However, with many systems being digital, there is a need to extract data from physical media and convert it into a digital medium.

The easiest way to do so is to take a picture of a physical document and then feed that picture to an image-to-text converter. The tool will extract the text in the image into a digital form and you can feed that data into the system. This is just one example of such tools helping in data extraction.

2. Can Ease Text Searching and Indexing Processes

Indexing and searching are a huge part of data processing. To process data, systems need to be able to search for specific data. To search for data, it must be indexed first. Image-to-text converters can help here if there are physical media involved.

Stored physical documents or images cannot be easily indexed or searched digitally. The traditional methods of indexing and searching are too inefficient. A quick and digital solution is to scan all such docs and images using a photo-to-text converter. The tool will extract the data in them and make it digitally available. The digitalized data can be stored and searched using digital means. Digital searching is much faster than traditional methods. So, online OCR tools can make the process faster.

3. Helps to Ease Text Data Integration and Analysis

As we already know, image-to-text converters can extract text from paper mediums or other types of physical media by using their pictures. This functionality makes it a prime candidate to use for the integration of data into digital systems.

Textual data can be immediately provided to the databases and systems that can use it for analysis. This can be done with some clever scripting to integrate an image-to-text converter into an existing document flow pipeline. That means that people do not have to modify or create a new pipeline which is good for efficiency. It should be noted that photo-to-text converters cannot do any analysis on their own. They only facilitate the analysis of textual data by making it digitally accessible.

4. Textual Data Entry Automation

Data entry is a timeless and tedious task. As long as paper media exists, data entry will also exist. Currently, in many places, data entry is a manual job. Somebody has to manually copy data from a physical medium into a digital medium.

However, with image-to-text tools, this task can be reliably automated. Many tools have their APIs that can be bought and integrated into a system that can scan and extract text from paper media and images. Even without an API, some clever Python scripting can do the same thing too. The system that does the data entry just inputs the image to the tool via a script, downloads the output, and enters it into its database.

Conclusion

So, those were some ways in which image-to-text converters can help you with data processing. The gist of the matter is that online OCR tools enable you to automate some parts of the data processing pipeline such as extraction, searching, and indexing.