Optical Character Recognition
Formal
Optical character recognition (OCR) or optical character reader is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-encoded text.
Practical
OCRs are widely used as a form of data entry from printed paper data records, whether passport documents, invoices, bank statements, computerized receipts, business cards, mail, printouts of static-data, or any suitable documentation. It is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that it 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 and text mining. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision.
