With optical character recognition (OCR) technology, OCR software automatically extracts text from any scanned PDF or image file and OCR converts it to a searchable PDF file. With OCR software, you can transform a scanned PDF of a paper document into a text-searchable PDF document. This new OCR searchable PDF is like an image containing text data, that you will be able to search for a specific keyword. When we read a document, our brain recognizes a character by analyzing the patterns and compare them against the pre-learned alphabet set. An OCR software application is trying to do the exact same. An OCR software reads the text pixels from a scanned image and compares it against a pre-trained dataset. Once the text is recognized, it is added as a hidden layer in the scanned PDF. This new "sandwiched PDF" file is popularly known as a searchable PDF.
Optical Character Recognition is the digital conversion of scanned and other image-based documents to searchable PDFs. The insurance industry deals with lots of paper documents, especially in claims management. Without an OCR converter application, insurance companies have to scan paper documents into PDF format and then do manual indexing. This is not a very efficient way of dealing with scanned documents. In the OCR process, OCR software detects the text content of a scanned document and adds this text data as an invisible text layer. OCR conversion of scanned PDFs to text-searchable PDFs is beneficial for an insurance company in improving productivity and cost-efficiency. OCR enables the organization to search and index the text content of scanned files with a quick keyword search. It eliminates the mistakes and significantly reduces the total time in searching for a piece of information.