Optical Character Recognition or Optical Character Reader (OCR)

Is the electronic or mechanical 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).

OCRconverters are used in almost any paper tasks to extract text from a scanned document (i.e. pdf), photo or just an image into useful text formats like word, excel, searchable PDF so that it can be formatted, edited, searched, indexed and used for other tasks. Optical Character Recogniton softwares are widely used for converting books and paper into electronic format, for document fields recognition (business cards, tests, forms) and automation of different business processes.