OCR

Optical Character Recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, 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.
Application
OCR engine has been developed into many kinds of object oriented OCR applications, such as
receipt OCR, invoice OCR, check OCR, legal billing document OCR.
It can be used for:
Data entry for business documents, e.g. check, passport, invoice, bank statement and
receipt
Automatic number plate recognition
Automatic insurance documents key information extraction
Extracting business card information into a contact list
More quickly make textual versions of printed documents, e.g. book scanning for Project
Gutenberg
Make electronic images of printed documents searchable, e.g. Google Books
Converting handwriting in real time to control a computer (pen computing)
Defeating CAPTCHA anti-bot systems, though these are specifically designed to prevent
OCR
[2][3][4]

In the 2000s, 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 smart phone.
Various commercial and open source OCR systems are available for most common writing
systems, including Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
characters.
Techniques
Pre-processing
Character recognition
There are two basic types of core OCR algorithm,
1. Matrix matching involves comparing an image to a stored glyph on a pixel-by-
pixel basis; it is also known as "pattern matching" or "pattern recognition"
2. Feature extraction decomposes glyphs into "features" like lines, closed loops,
line direction, and line intersections. These are compared with an abstract vector-like
representation of a character, which might reduce to one or more glyph prototypes.
Post-processing
Application-specific optimizations