Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Optical character recognition (OCR), is the electronic translation of scanned images typicaly handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine encoded text.

This technique is often used to convert books or documents into electronic files, perhaps to computerise a record keeping system in an office, or to publish the text on a website.

Optical character recognition (OCR) makes it possible to edit the text, search for a word or phrase and store it more compactly. Further techniques can then be applied such as translation or text to speech recognition.

Some Optical character recognition (OCR) systems require calibration to read a specific font and early versions needed to be programmed with images of each character, and worked on one font at a time. However, modern day Intelligent OCR systems have a high degree of recognition accuracy for most fonts and some systems are capable of reproducing formatted output that closely matches the original scanned page including images, columns and other non text components.