Introduction

Media Server can run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on images such as scanned documents and photographs of documents. You can also run OCR on video to extract subtitles and scrolling text that sometimes appears during television news broadcasts.

Media Server OCR:

  • searches images and video for text-like regions, and only performs OCR on those regions.
  • provides options to restrict the language and character types used during recognition, which can increase the accuracy of OCR in some cases.
  • supports specialized font types.
  • supports many languages.
  • can automatically adjust when scanned documents are rotated by either 90 or 180 degrees from upright.
  • can automatically adjust for skewed text in scanned documents and photographs.

NOTE: Media Server OCR recognizes machine-printed text. Handwritten text is not supported.

OCR Document File Formats

When you ingest a PDF or office document file, Media Server extracts both embedded images and text elements. The OCR engine runs OCR on the images that are extracted from the document, and by default, merges the text that was contained in text elements into the results. This means that the OCR results contain both the text that is extracted from images and the text that was contained in text elements.