OCR and Real Estate Records

Land and real estate professionals have faced the problem for decades: a document handwritten by a clerk a hundred years ago in what seems be hieroglyphics. You’ve been looking at the document for five minutes but you still can’t quite make out if it covers Section 3 or Section 8 due to the antique handwriting. Optical Character Recognition can’t help there quite yet, achieving at best 90% accuracy on the best of handwriting, but the technology has significantly advanced in the past several years.

According to Wikipedia, optical character recognition (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document or a photo of a document. Gone are the days of having a document up on one screen and your runsheet on another, slowly going thru and typing out the pertinent details. All documents within our courthouse system are OCRed for your convenience so that you can quickly extract out the details you need. Soon, many details will be pre-annotated so that when you add a document to your runsheet the details you need are already filled out for you. This allows you to spend your time reviewing documents rather than typing details into an excel spreadsheet.

While our custom OCR system is state of the art, sometimes even it has trouble reading text. Whenever this is the case, you are able to quickly edit what the system extracted with exactly what you want it to say. Your corrections help the system to better understand difficult-to-read text and our OCR system is improving everyday as our users annotate more documents. If you are interested in learning more about our proprietary OCR, contact us today.