Optical Character Recognition

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the mechanical or electronic conversion of scanned or photoed images of typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded/computer-readable text. It is widely used as a form of data entry from some sort of original paper data source, whether passport documents, invoices, bank statement, receipts, business card, mail, or any number of printed records.

It is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, displayed on-line, and used in machine processes such as machine translation, text-to-speech, key data extraction and text mining. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision.

Early versions needed to be programmed with images of each character, and worked on one font at a time. "Intelligent" systems with a high degree of recognition accuracy for most fonts are now common. Some commercial systems are capable of reproducing formatted output that closely approximates the original scanned page including images, columns and other non-textual components.

OCR has been made available online as a service (WebOCR), in a cloud computing environment, and in mobile applications like real-time translation of foreign-language signs on a smartphone.

Related recommendations:

Best OCR Software - Best Choice: tesseract-ocr; Optional: Microsoft OneNote.
Best OCR Online Programs - Best Choice: Free-OCR; Optional: Online OCR.