From the many OCR software applications available on the market, users can choose the one which suits their needs best. Today OCR technology is far more advanced than it was only a few years ago. From the wide variety of OCR software, we have picked several leading solutions which provide higher accuracy, greater speed and good page layout reconstruction.

As there is a growing need to go paperless and digitize the company’s information, all businesses are presented with the task of selecting the right OCR software. So, if your desk is piled up with paper, it is time to use one of these applications.

ABBYY FineReader 10 Professional stands out with its unmatched accuracy and extended language support. The solution recognizes 186 languages, including Latin and Cyrillic languages, Armenian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Hebrew, and Korean. It also includes a number of advanced features – digital camera OCR, barcode recognition, command line integration and image enhancement. ABBYY’s technology delivers intelligent recreation of the document layout and structure – FineReader reproduces all headers and footers, tables of contents, diagrams and font styles. ABBYY FineReader 10 Professional is the clear choice for users who would like to save time from correcting mistakes in the processed files. The cons of the application are slower processing speed and higher price in comparison to other OCR software.

OmniPage Professional 17 is a fast, accurate and very convenient application. It offers many advanced features, including a Microsoft Word toolbar which lets users perform OCR tasks with a single click, Digital Camera 3DC technology that automatically corrects any distortions of images taken with a digital camera, as well as collection of data from forms. OmniPage Pro 17 also includes PaperPort 11, a desktop document management software. Automatically detects Asian languages, which makes it perfect for documents which contain mixed languages. Cons: Slower and more expensive than Readiris.

Readiris 12 Corporate offers very high accuracy and a number of advanced capabilities. The software recognizes 128 languages and features business card recognition, extended PDF support and boasts hand-printed notes recognition, which enables users to transform notes into editable text. Readiris 12 also features advanced recognition of tables. Choose Readiris 12 Corporate if you are looking for streamline OCR processing at a significantly lower cost. Drawbacks: not very accurate in processing handwritten texts and does not include editing features which makes it quite unsuitable for processing low-quality scanned documents which need many corrections. The software produces slightly less accurate recognition results than FineReader and OmniPage, and is less efficient in reproducing documents with complex layouts.

TypeReader Desktop 7.0 does not offer as high accuracy or as many advanced features as the above applications but deserves its place in our list since it is by far the fastest software on the market. It performs conversion at speed of 8,000 pages per hour at maximum reliability. If perfect results are not a must, and you have tons of paper to process, TypeReader is the right solution for you.