What To Look For in Character Reading and Verification Capabilities

Whether you’re reading stamped alphanumeric codes on automotive parts or verifying date and lot code information on medicine bottles or packages, there are several capabilities to look for when evaluating character reading and verification tools, including:

• Powerful OCR technology to handle process variations: The OCR tool should be capable of handling typical printing variations such as stroke width variations, skew in characters, background variations, touching characters and wide variations in printing processes. Having high read rates is extremely important.
• Easy font training: This capability builds a font by learning models of characters that appear in a series of images. The images should include multiple instances of each character, and span the full range of quality likely to occur in production.
• Built-in image pre-processing tools: These tools should have capability of sharpening the edge contrast of characters and filtering out extraneous background in the image.
• Flexible fielding: Flexible fielding functionality relates to the ability to field both fixed length and variable string length characters.