OCR
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Optical character recognition (OCR) is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used as a form of data entry from printed paper data records, whether passport documents, invoices, bank statements, or any other optical document. OCR is a common method of digitizing printed text so that it can be electronically searched, stored more compactly, displayed on-line, and used in machine processes such as machine translation, text-to-speech, and text mining. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and computer vision.
Why Learn OCR?
There are many reasons why one might want to learn about OCR. Some people may be interested in learning about OCR simply out of curiosity. Others may need to learn about OCR in order to meet academic requirements. Still others may wish to learn OCR in order to use it to develop their career and professional ambitions.
OCR can be used in a wide variety of applications, including:
- Digitizing printed documents
- Automating data entry
- Creating searchable archives
- Translating text
- Converting text to speech
- Mining text for data
