Zonal OCR extracts only specified data fields from scanned documents and stores them in a structured database for further processing. It preferentially extracts important data unlike regular OCR, which extracts all data indiscriminately. Zonal OCR allows relevant data capture from documents with minimal human intervention, avoids redundancy, and enables easy team access to save time over manual data entry. However, it may fail to extract data from semi-structured or complex multi-line documents. Common applications of zonal OCR include invoice, purchase order, and ID card digitization.
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What is zonal OCR?
In automated data extraction applications, one of the most useful
developments in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Technology has been
the Zonal OCR, also called Template OCR and Zone OCR.
Zonal OCR is useful when specific parts of a document must be
preferentially or “zonally” extracted.
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How does Zonal OCR different from
regular OCR ?
Regular OCR extracts all data from documents into accessible and
manipulatable digital data. All matter present in the parent document is
extracted with no differentiation by relevance or importance. Oftentimes,
this kind of data extraction entails further manual extraction of relevant data
from the ensemble of information indiscriminately gathered from the original
document.
Zonal OCR, on the other hand, extracts only the important and specified
data fields from a scanned document and stores the data in a structured
database, for further automation or processing.
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Advantages of zonal OCR
● Zonal OCRs allow capture of relevant data from paper documents, forms
and e-documents that can be directly used in the next step of the
automated business process with need for minimal human intervention.
● It avoids redundancy in data.
● Zonal data extraction enables easy access to data to the entire team, or
even company..
● Zonal data extraction can save valuable time otherwise wasted on
manual data entry.
● Zonal OCR software can extract metadata from documents such as
names, dates, and invoice numbers.
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Drawbacks of Zonal OCR
● Less sophisticated Zonal OCRs could fail in extracting data from semi-
structured documents, in which the fields to be extracted are not in the
same position in all the documents.
● Zonal OCRs are incapable of extracting text from complex data fields,
such as multi-line postal addresses.
● Zonal OCRs also struggle to extract sequential data fields (e.g.
continuing product numbers in the same invoice or receipt).
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Applications of zonal OCR?
● Invoice digitization
● Purchase Order digitization
● ID card digitization
● Text detection in images and objects
