OCR vs IDP: What Is the Difference?
What OCR Does
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) converts images of text, such as scanned documents or photographs, into machine-readable text. On its own, OCR produces raw text without understanding what that text represents.
What IDP Adds
Intelligent Document Processing builds on OCR output by classifying the document type, identifying specific fields (such as invoice number, date, or total amount), extracting tables, and validating extracted values against business rules. This turns raw text into structured, usable data.
When Each Approach Is Appropriate
OCR alone may be sufficient for simple text digitisation tasks. IDP is more appropriate when a business needs structured, validated data from documents at scale, such as processing invoices into an accounting system or extracting identity fields from application forms.
Choosing an Approach for Your Documents
The right approach depends on document variety, volume, and how the extracted data will be used downstream. Businesses processing a wide range of document formats generally benefit from an IDP pipeline with classification and validation built in.
Related Product
A multi-document OCR and Intelligent Document Processing system that extracts, classifies, validates, and structures information from business documents.
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