OCR Advanced Settings

6 minute read Last updated on July 12, 2024

This topic describes the Advanced Settings window for nodes that use optical character recognition (OCR). These nodes contain the Advanced Settings button, which accesses the OCR Settings window. See the illustration below:

Pre-process

Note: Dispatcher Stratus supports the Tesseract OCR engine.

Using the Advanced OCR Settings Window

The Advanced OCR Settings window contains settings you can use to adjust the accuracy of the OCR results as well as the performance time of the OCR process.

The Advanced OCR Settings window contains the following tabs, each with a set of related settings. You can specify settings for:

Buttons

The following buttons are available from each tab in the OCR Settings window:

  • Restore Defaults - To reset all customized settings to their default values, click this button.
  • Help - To access Online Help, click this button.
  • Cancel - To exit the window without saving any changes, click this button.
  • Save - To preserve your node configuration and exit the window, click this button.

Pre-process

Pre-processing procedures can be applied to images to enhance their quality before OCR recognition is performed. Enabling or disabling these options may improve the quality of your output and/or the performance time of the OCR process.

  • Deskew Image - When this setting is enabled, images that have been scanned crookedly are automatically straightened during the preparation process. The default value is enabled.

Rotation

Before performing OCR, the application tries to detect and correct incorrectly oriented pages. If you already know the exact misalignment of incoming files and want to speed up processing time by avoiding this auto-detection process, you can choose specific options here.

  • Automatic image rotation - When this setting is enabled, the orientation of incoming images is detected and improperly oriented page images are automatically rotated (by 90, 180, or 270 degrees) before OCR takes place. This enabled option is the default value for rotation and mirroring.

  • Rotate image to the right 90 degrees - When this setting is enabled, improperly oriented page images are rotated by 90 degrees, clockwise.

    Important! Dispatcher Stratus does not auto-rotate documents that are scanned in a short-edge direction (typically top-first). This can cause OCR zones to not line up properly with the intended text. To realign OCR zones with the intended text, select the Rotate image to the right 90 degrees option.

  • Rotate image to the left 90 degrees - When this setting is enabled, improperly oriented page images are rotated by 90 degrees, counter-clockwise.

  • Rotate image down 180 degrees - When this setting is enabled, improperly oriented page images are turned upside down.

  • Do not rotate the image - When this setting is enabled, the image is not rotated.

Recognition Tab

To improve OCR accuracy and processing time, you can specify specific settings to assist in the recognition process.

Note: The set of options available on this tab is determined by the OCR engine, based on the functional capabilities of the engine. If an option does not appear in the tab, it is not supported by the OCR engine. The illustration below shows the options available. All options, including the available languages for each OCR engine, are described in sections below the illustration.

Recognition Settings

Languages and dictionaries

  • Languages in document - This window displays all languages currently loaded into your system. Check the box next to the languages you want to include in the OCR recognition process. You can select multiple languages, but you must select at least one. The default setting at this field reflects the default language for your operating system.

Language Options

Dispatcher Stratus supports the following languages:

  • English
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Spanish

Recognition Options

To improve recognition of text during the OCR process, you can provide a description of the original document’s layout, reflecting how you want the layout to be handled.

Description

  • Automatic - To auto-detect the layout (e.g., whether the text is in columns, etc.), select this option. This option allows for the speediest processing time. This option is useful if:

    • You want to process your documents quickly.

    • Your documents contain pages with different/unknown layouts.

    • Your documents have pages with multiple columns and a table.

    • Your documents have pages containing more than one table.

  • Single Column, no Table - Enable this setting if your pages contain any of the following:

    • One column and no tables (e.g., business letters or pages from a book).
    • Words or numbers arranged in columns that should be organized into a single column.

  • Multiple Columns, no Table - Enable this setting if your pages contain text in columns that should be kept in separate columns, similar to the original layout. If table-like data is detected, it will be placed in columns, not in a gridded table.

  • Single Column with Table - Enable this setting if your pages contain only one column of text and a table.

  • Spreadsheet - Enable this setting if your pages contain a table to be exported to a spreadsheet program or be treated as a table.

  • Optimize the OCR process for:

    • Fast recognition - Enable this setting to optimize the recognition process for speed. Although this setting produces the least accurate results, it can be useful when you know that your incoming documents are of good quality and can yield acceptable, accurate results. With this setting enabled, advanced formatting, such as colored text/background and inverted text, may not be retained.

    • Mid-level accuracy/speed recognition - Enable this setting for a balance between speedy processing and accurate results.

    • Most accurate recognition - Enable this setting to optimize the recognition process for accuracy.

  • Specify maximum size of the images allowed - Set a Width and Height limit (in pixels) for incoming images. All incoming images that exceed those specified values will not be processed. The default value is 8400 x 8400 pixels.

  • Timeout - Specify the time in seconds you want to elapse before the OCR recognition process times out.

    Note: If the OCR engine is processing a document when the Timeout reaches the specified amount of time, the process will stop and generate the document based on the processed document. For example, if the OCR engine is on page 27 of a 30-page document when it reaches the Timeout limit, it will generate a 27-page document, and the remaining pages will be lost. You can increase the Timeout limit to allow the OCR engine sufficient time to process particularly large documents.

Output Tab

You can also specify settings for the output of the OCR process. Note that the Output tab appears only for nodes that convert documents to another format. In addition, if you access this window from the Advanced OCR node and have specified Original Document + Metadata as the Output option, this tab does not appear.

Output

Output

  • Remove Blank Pages - When this setting is enabled, blank pages will not be included in the output file. This box is unchecked by default.