User:Chiemelieanayo

Optical character recognition also optical character reader OCR is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine encodedrptext whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document,a scene photo or from substitute text superimposed on an image. It is widely used as a form of information entry from printed paper data records whether passport documents, invoices, bank statements etc. It is a common method of digitising printed texts so that they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly,displayed on line and used in machine processes such as cognitive computing, machine translation, (extracted) text to speech, key data and text mining. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision.

Early optical character recognition may be traced to technologies telegraphy and creating reading devices for the blind. In 1914, Emmanuel Goldberg developed a machine that read characters and converted them into standard telegraph code.

OCR have been developed into many kinds of domain specific OCR applications, such as receipt OCR, invoice OCR, check OCR, legal billing OCR.

They can be used for :

Data entry for business documents. Automatic number plate recognition. In airports, for passport recognition and information extraction. Automatic insurance documents key information extraction. Extracting business card information into a contact list.

TYPES Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Optical Word Recognition (OWR). Intelligent Word Recognition (IWR). Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR).

With the advent of smartphones and sunglasses, OCR can be used in internet connected mobile device that extract text captured using the device's camera. Those devices that do not have OCR functionality built into the operating system will use an OCR API to extract the text from the image file captured and provided by the device.