From Pen to Pixel: Converting Handwritten Text into Digital Formats

Today’s world of business demand digitization and faster ways to achieve it. Collecting, arranging, and maintaining paper documents, files, and records isn’t easy. Taking too much time and space, keeping physical documents requires great attention and responsibility.

There is a dire need for digital documentation that has many takers like:

Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals
Digitizing patient prescriptions and medical PDFs is a crucial challenge in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. Handwritten text detection also impacts patient enrolment and form digitization, improving the user experience for hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.

Insurance
The insurance industry faces delays in processing claims due to various handwriting styles in claims documents. Automating claim processing with handwriting recognition can accelerate the pipeline and prevent costly delays.

Banking
In many developing countries, banks process many cheques manually, verifying entries like signatures and dates. Implementing handwriting text recognition can save costs and hours of human work, making cheque processing more efficient.

Online Libraries
To make historical knowledge accessible, image scans of documents are digitized. Handwriting recognition plays a vital role in identifying text in images, enabling indexing, querying, and browsing of medieval and 20th-century documents for modern-day use.

Though technology is galloping forward, there are companies still buried under paperwork. Upgrading to digital documentation allows companies to access data instantly from anywhere and anytime. Saving time and money, allowing better collaboration with employees and partners, and ensuring the confidentiality of sensitive information.

Challenges of document digitization:

Docketry is an intelligent document processing solution built to help enterprises working in document-heavy industries to improve operational efficiency, reduce processing time and errors, and enhance data accuracy and security. This helps in cost savings, increased productivity, and better compliance with regulatory requirements. Docketry also has advanced features like document summarization, and sentiment analysis helping businesses to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, enabling enterprises to make data-driven decisions and gain a competitive advantage. Want to know how Docketry can help your business? Talk to our experts now.

  • The rapidly changing technology necessitates frequent equipment upgrades, leading to higher costs and potential obsolescence.
  • The lack of preparation and time-consuming processing procedures add complexity to the digitization process.
  • Funding and manpower emerge as major hurdles, demanding resources for staff training, advanced equipment, and suitable software. 
  • There is a need for employing the necessary staff to handle digitization as the existing staff needs to focus on other responsibilities.

Challenges in handwriting recognition and conversion:

  • Individuals exhibit a wide range of stroke variability and ambiguity in their handwriting.
  • The handwriting style varies from person to person, leading to inconsistency.
  • Source documents/images may suffer from poor quality due to degradation with time.
  • Handwritten text does not conform to the strict alignment of printed text on white paper.
  • Cursive handwriting poses challenges in character separation and recognition.
  • Handwritten text may have variable right rotations, unlike uniformly printed text.
  • Obtaining a high-quality labeled dataset for learning is costlier compared to synthetic data.

Technologies used in digital conversion of data:

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is the one usually used to convert images and documents with data into editable text. The conversion allows easy organizing and sharing of your ideas, information, and message you want to communicate. There is many OCR software in business that have been used from time-to-time. But with OCRs, there are some performance limitations when it comes to extracting complex, unorganized, unstructured data. The OCRs are either unable to recognize and extract data with precision or are prone to making errors.

This can be overcome by using Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) and advanced intelligent document processing (IDP) software like Docketry. The advancements in Deep Learning have fast-tracked the progress in cracking handwritten text recognition. Recognizing handwritten text is done with algorithms that are much more intelligent than generic OCR. While Docketry uses OCR backed by powerful AI and Machine Learning technologies that help digitize even the complex documents that may contain cursive handwritten texts. With the ever-increasing use cases across sectors such as banking, insurance, logistics, etc., Docketry is evolving with time catering to a spectrum of demands with innovative and efficient solutions for digitizing complex, unstructured, unorganized, and handwritten documents, and data.