Optical Character Recognition • OCR

What is optical character recognition?

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a type of technology that allows computers to read text from images and convert it into digital data. This can be extremely useful for digitizing old documents or converting scanned images into editable text. OCR technology relies on pattern recognition to identify the shapes of letters and numbers in an image. It then compares these patterns to a database of known characters, in order to determine what the text says. OCR technology has come a long way in recent years, and can now reliably recognize a wide range of fonts and languages. However, it is not perfect, and can sometimes struggle with words that are poorly lit, blurry, or in a particularly ornate font. Nonetheless, OCR remains a powerful tool for digitizing documents and extracting information from images.

While early OCR systems were limited in their accuracy, today’s OCR software is much more sophisticated and capable of reliably converting even complex text into digital form.