ICR - Intelligent Character Recognition – Help Center

Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) is an extended technology of the optical character recognition (OCR ). While the OCR technology is designed to extract machine-printed characters, the ICR technology retreives information provided as hand-printed characters

The ICR technology can extract hand-printed characters that are separated and written as individual characters in areas/zones - these areas/zones needs to be specified as fixed fields of a machine readable forms. Alternativelly, they need to be automatically detected.

Example of a form containing hand-printed characters:

Important note: ICR is not able to extract texts in “cursive handwriting” as in this example:

In most cases, the ICR technology is linked to Field Level / Zonal Recognition and forms processing.
To enhance the ICR recognition accuracy, it is recommended to use meta data, for example regular expressions, dictionaries or database lookups.

The following ABBYY SDKs and products support ICR

FineReader Engine
Since the version 12, Release 3, ICR is as well included in the Linux version. Since the Release 4 of the version 12, it is as well included in the Mac version of FineReader Engine (in lower versions, the ICR technology was only supported in the Windows version.
FlexiCapture SDK – this SDK is designed for forms processing and data extraction, ICR and template matching for fixed forms are part of the default feature set. In addition, ABBYY offers this technology as a product in form of the FlexiCapture platform.

Cloud OCR SDK – the ABBYY OCR service, allows reading zones that contain hand-printed, separated characters. This online OCR service for developers does not contain any automated template matching technologies, therefor the zones have to be defined when uploading the tasks into the service.

ICR - Intelligent Character Recognition