⊿ Point. {R} Glossary. ◢ Keyword: O. ◥ University. {q} PhD. {tr} Training. ⚫ UK. ⚫ England. ⬤ London. ↂ EndNote. ☗ MDX. MDX: PhD. ↂ Blogger. RSK666-0000005. Optical character recognition. Optical Character Recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic conversion of scanned or photographed 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. History[edit] Types[edit]