Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. (context computing English) The electronic identification and digital encoding of printed or handwritten characters by means of an optical scanner and specialized software.
Wikipedia
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, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo (for example the text on signs and billboards in a landscape photo) or from subtitle text superimposed on an image (for example from a television broadcast). It is widely used as a form of data entry from printed paper data records, whether passport documents, invoices, bank statements, computerised receipts, business cards, mail, printouts of static-data, or any suitable documentation. 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 versions needed to be trained with images of each character, and worked on one font at a time. Advanced systems capable of producing a high degree of recognition accuracy for most fonts are now common, and with support for a variety of digital image file format inputs. Some systems are capable of reproducing formatted output that closely approximates the original page including images, columns, and other non-textual components.
Optical Character Recognition is a Unicode block containing signal characters for OCR standards.
Usage examples of "optical character recognition".
Over the past two decades, King's College Research Institute in Systematic Theology had used optical character recognition software in unison with linguistic translation devices to digitize and catalog an enormous collection of texts-encyclopedias of religion, religious biographies, sacred scriptures in dozens of languages, histories, Vatican letters, diaries of clerics, anything at all that qualified as writings on human spirituality.
Basalom scanned the papers again,-but his optical character recognition routine still couldn?
I borrowed it for use with this optical character recognition equipment, before I got my eyes.
Kurzweil is the inventor of a variety of amazing devices, most notably the OCR (optical character recognition) software that scans typed, printed, and handwritten text.
The optical character recognition software interfaces perfectly with the scanner and the word processing program.