Rich Media OCR

I often speak of unique uses of OCR, and here is yet another. OCRing video files! But why? Part of the management of rich media assets is indexing these files. Technologies such as speech recognition and optical character recognition give a greater index and search value to rich media.

By using OCR technology to find and extract text from video frames, the data can be stored as meta-data. In the simplest scenario, this is a text file that accompanies the video file. More complex environments will even tell you the minuet and second the text occurs. Because this is not a traditional use of the technology, some special consideration must take place.

First is converting and separating frames to individual images files. For the OCR to be effective it needs to work on a series of images. Although a video is only a sequence of images that repeat at a high rate of speed, it's still somewhat of a challenge to convert video files such as MPEG to a series of images. Not only that, dealing with motion blurs that might occur in some frames will also be a problem.

The second challenge is dealing with frames that are repeats. Essentially, because there are so many similar images that are only slightly different from each other, the text on a series of frames might not change. Better OCR results will account for this and not repeat text as the frames would.

And finally dealing with the variations of fonts, and often small sizes. This requires an OCR engine with specific settings for specialized OCR, and one that is very accurate on complex low quality documents.

I expect that in the future, this technique in conjunction with speech recognition will be used in eDiscovery, content management, and robust search of rich media files.

eDiscovery and OCR

I have touched on this topic a little on one of my previous posts but because of eDiscovery's popularity I thought it fitting to look at OCRs interaction with eDiscovery preparedness. Organizations who are not ready for audits and court orders to deliver documents are spending tremendous amounts of money to undo bad document processes. Because of this, preparing yourself to be ready for possible legal future events is critical and a long term cost saver.

The purpose of OCR technology in conjunction with eDiscovery readiness is based in the principle of having as much data at your finger tips as possible. The proper policies of being ready is heavy in records management policies, and a good taxonomy that is strictly followed. Because of this sometimes OCR is overlooked as a tool. With the proper above practices it should be possible to pull up any document at any time. However OCR should be viewed as an insurance policy, by OCRing every document you have even more information than you would otherwise, and information is the key to success in these situations.

eDiscovery also includes other types of data, email is one of the most popular. But what about the data contained in email attachments that are PDF, TIFF, JPEG? OCR is the only tool to extract the data from the images in these formats. Surprisingly products that provide eDiscovery tools just for email still do not yet heavily deploy OCR technology, but the information contained in these attachments is often as valuable as the emails themselves.

In addition to all the traditional proper records management practices, and eDiscovery tools, OCR should be considered as a must have for organizations preparing themselves for audits or court orders, and sometimes even more importantly knowing what to omit.