Off-line and On-line OCR

Transcript of this video:
OCR can be either online or offline. Online OCR refers to the automatic conversion of text as it is written.

Offline OCR, on the other hand, is the static representation of handwriting as with recognizing a scanned image/pdf.

Lacking the sensor to picks up the pen-tip movements, it cannot say recognize if this line was drawn bottom up or not. An offline OCR service will have no input regarding the order of strokes or characters.

Having said that, imagine the work behind recognizing this piece of text - "Ill see you at 1130pm in the LION HALL 8."

I suppose you think its no big deal. But did you notice this?
"I l i 1 L
0 O
3 8"

The regularity and clarity of your writing style will greatly determine if the following characters look like these instead:

"m rn w vv d cl"

Even an online OCR service will have problems recognizing a text thats too small or cursive handwriting.

The advantage of an offline OCR service is that you may OCR your documents any time and even years after it has been written. We do have a number of users digitizing their old documents to reduce storage space and also, make them searchable.