What Is Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that converts images containing typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-readable text data. Businesses often have critical information locked inside non-editable formats like scanned paper documents, PDFs, and images. This information cannot be easily searched, copied, or entered into other software systems without slow, expensive, and error-prone manual data entry.
How it helps#
OCR automates the extraction of this text, essentially "reading" the document for a computer. This transforms static documents into dynamic, searchable data that can be instantly indexed, analyzed, or integrated with other business systems like accounting or customer relationship management (CRM) software.
How it works#
The OCR process begins when the software analyzes an image, such as a scanned invoice. It first identifies the page layout, separating text blocks from images, and then isolates individual characters within the text.
Once a character is isolated, the software uses pattern recognition algorithms to compare its shape against a vast database of known letters, numbers, and symbols. It selects the most likely match for each character and assembles them into words and sentences, outputting a fully digital, editable text file. More advanced OCR systems use AI to improve accuracy by understanding the context of words in a sentence.
How it is different#
Taking a photo or scan of a document creates a digital picture of the text. OCR, on the other hand, interprets that picture to extract the actual text data, turning a simple image into intelligent information that can be edited, searched, and used by other applications.