Optical character recognition (optical character reader) (
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, computerized receipts, business cards, mail, printouts of static-data, or any suitable documentation. It is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that it 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 and
text mining. OCR is a field of research in
pattern recognition,
artificial intelligence and
computer vision.