Definition and purpose of OCR

Summary

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-encoded text. The input can come from scanned documents, photos of documents, scene text in images (such as signs and billboards), or subtitle text embedded in video. The purpose of OCR is to digitize text so it can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, displayed online, and used in automated machine processes such as text-to-speech, machine translation, and text mining. OCR is widely used for data entry and document digitization tasks, including processing passports, invoices, bank statements, receipts, business cards, and other printed records, and it is an active research area in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and computer vision.

Key Points

• 1

  OCR converts visual text (typed, handwritten, or printed) from images into machine-encoded text.

• 2

  It enables digitized text to be edited, searched, stored, and used in downstream automated applications.

• 3

  OCR is used for common data-entry and document digitization workflows such as processing legal, financial, and business documents.