Intelligent character recognition (ICR) involves computerized translation of any text that is manually entered into characters that can be read by a machine. It is very often used with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) during form processing. Scanned images are analyzed and then changed into machine readable characters.

Data entry operators who used do the manual data entry of the paper forms are today being replaced by these OCR and ICR technologies because it is known to save a lot of time and money. One study found the ICR technology to be 11 times faster than the manual data entry professionals and had almost 99% accuracy.

Some of the inputs for ICR in forms processing include,

• Type-written data
• Computer generated document
• Handwritten documents
• Check boxes
• Bubbles
• Bar Codes
• Signatures
• Magnetic ink characters

After the ICR recognition process all data is reviewed and validated manually in batches to eradicate any errors. This is done on a split screen that compares both the documents. After validation the data is converted to any file format as required. The technology used for Intelligent Character recognition is called neural network software technology.

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