Automatic Image Preprocessing

OCR quality may be affected by distorted text lines, document skew, noise, and other defects commonly found on scanned images and digital photos.

ABBYY FineReader offers an image preprocessing feature to deal with image defects of this kind. When activated, the image preprocessing feature automatically decides what action to take depending on the input image type and applies the correction. Adjustments include removing noise from digital photos, deskewing, straightening text lines, and correcting trapezium distortions.

Note. These operations can be very time consuming.

To activate automatic preprocessing when images are scanned and opened:

  1. Open the Options dialog box (Tools>Options…).
  2. Make sure to check the Enable image preprocessing option on the Scan/Open tab in the Image Processing group.

Important! The automatic preprocessing option may also be toggled in the image opening dialog box (File menu>Open PDF File/Image…) and in the ABBYY FineReader scanning dialog box. For more information, see Selecting the Scanning Interface.

Note. If the Enable image preprocessing option was turned off while scanning or opening images, the image can be processed manually using the Edit Image dialog box.

For details, see Editing Images Manually.