Updated March 13, 2023
Introduction to Azure OCR
- The following article provides an outline for Azure OCR. Generally, OCR, known as Optical Character Recognition, permits the user to remove published or handwritten text from images like snaps of street symbols and products, also from documents such as bills, invoices, articles, financial reports, and more.
- Microsoft Azure’s OCR technologies provision mining printed typescript in various languages, handwritten text in many languages, currency signs from images, digits, and also multi-page PDF brochures.
- OCR for print text contains provision for English, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and also Korean (preview) plus Cyrillic and Latin languages having the newest preview update.
- Whereas OCR for handwritten text English provision and also a preview of French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, and Portuguese language support.
Using Azure OCR API
- Azure’s Cognitive Service, recognized as Computer Vision, is defined as an AI service that examines content in images along with the video. In Azure OCR, you will find Azure Cognitive Services that is a computer vision API.
- We can evaluate the exactness of OCR algorithms delivered by three cloud services recognized as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure – which are the most popular ones among OCR providers.
- Optical Character Recognition is essential for machine vision proficiency. OCR allows users to identify and extract text info from provided images; thus, it can be handled or stored further. So, this is very beneficial for processing scans/photographs of text, for illustration when functioning with invoices, signage, and scanned forms.
- The Microsoft Computer Vision API is said to be an inclusive set of computer vision implements, spanning proficiencies such as creating smart picture thumbnails, identifying personalities in pictures, and labeling the content of pictures by means of AI.
Accuracy:
Azure OCR API delivers two kinds of OCR endpoints named OCR from image URL and OCR from image file. Here, both endpoints operate similarly but have altered sources. The script identification functions well and yields the script classified into sections of the script. Every section includes lines, and every line includes words that comprise the exact text. The separation is appropriate for understanding the arrangement of the content in the image; however, if you just want the text as a single big string and don’t upkeep about locating, it’ll need extra code.
Price:
You will get 5000 requests per month if you use the free tier for Microsoft’s API. API includes 3 plans that are paid:
- $19.90: 15000 requests per month
- $74.90: 70000 requests per month
- $199.90: 200000 requests per month.
Benefits To Use Azure OCR
With the help of Azure OCR API, we can get the benefits listed below:
- Capability to execute an OCR on nearly any image, file, or even PDF.
- Whirlwind fast speed
- Able to read QR as well as bar codes.
- Incomparable accurateness
- Able to convert PDFs and images into searchable documents.
- Can run nearby without SaaS prerequisite
- Exceptional Substitute to Azure OCR from Microsoft Cognitive Services.
Features Azure OCR
Organizations today are implementing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and document AI technologies to convert their huge troves of pictures and documents rapidly into actionable insights. Thus, these insights power RPA (Robotic Process Automation), industry-specific solutions, and knowledge. However, there are exist various challenges to successfully executing these scenarios at scales – such as a large number of global and languages, a vast amount of data documents files, and risk of data privacy and confidentiality. Hence, Microsoft’s Computer vision’s Azure OCR and API technology prevails as a Cognitive Services Cloud API plus as Docker containers. The end-users use this in diverse scenarios on the platform of cloud and inside their networks for helping to automate picture and document file processing where extracted is possible for 73 languages around the globe.
A few features are as follows:
- The computer vision API distributes with a rich feature set including OCR to classify printed text originated in images.
- Azure OCR prints script extraction, which is available in 73 languages.
- Handwritten text extraction is available in English.
- Text outlines and words are having position and confidence tallies.
- OCR requires no language credentials as essential.
- Provision for mixed languages, mixed-mode including handwritten and print.
Cloud Vision vs Azure OCR
For a couple of years, Azure OCR and Computer Vision are having in high demand.
Cloud Vision
Google Cloud Vision contains OCR services which also contains an OCR engine for extracting text from documents. The vision API is able to identify and extract text from provided images. In addition, you will find two gloss features that upkeep OCR (optical character recognition) described as follows:
- TEXT_RECOGNITION identifies and extracts text info from any provided image. Like a pic may include a street or traffic symbol. The JSON contains the complete string plus distinct words along with their related bounding boxes.
- DOCUMENT_TEXT_RECOGNITION similarly identifies text info from any specific image, but here the response is improved for documents and compact text. The JSON contains block, paragraph, page, word, and also break data.
Current methodologies of OCR integrate deep learning to increase a greater precision due to the range in handwriting and published text graces. For instance, deep learning involves huge amounts of data for training of model; businesses like Google proceeds an edge in generating encouraging outcomes by having their OCR amenities. For example, Google Cloud Vision OCR is a fragment of the Google Cloud Vision API to mine text info from the images.
Azure OCR
The OCR API, which Microsoft Azure cloud-based provides, delivers developers with access to advanced algorithms to read images and return structured content. OCR is a technique of converting handwritten/published texts into machine-encrypted typescript. It has continuously been a chief area of study in computer vision because of its several applications through numerous fields such as Banks that implement OCR equate statements, and also Governments apply OCR for the gatherings of survey response.
Conclusion
- OCR is Azure’s technology feature provided by Computer Vision which introduces rich text extraction methods from documents and images with script styles and varied languages.
- The file formats supported for the OCR tool for extracting text from specific files includes – .gif, .jpeg, .jpg, .bmp, .png, .tiff.
Recommended Articles
This is a guide to Azure OCR. Here we discuss Using Azure OCR API along with the Benefits of Using OCR and a few features. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more-
