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optical character recognition
Sign in to saveAlso known as optical character reader, Visual Recognition
computer recognition of visual text
Optical character recognition is technology that allows computers to read and understand text from images or scanned documents. It matters because it makes it possible to convert printed or handwritten documents into digital text that computers can process, search, and edit.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
~24 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Video of the process of scanning and real-time optical character recognition (OCR) with a portable scanner
Optical character recognition (OCR) or optical character reader is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene photo (for example the text on signs and billboards in a landscape photo) or from subtitle text superimposed on an image (for example: from a television broadcast).
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “optical character recognition” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.