What is the full form of OCR?

The full form of OCR is Optical Character Recognition. It is also known as text recognition or OCR (optical character reader). It is necessary to transform scanned paper records or images of documents obtained with a digital camera into editable, readable, and searchable data.

• It is possible to examine and analyse a scanned page of a physical document on the screen; however, for the machine, it is merely a series of black and white dots that it cannot distinguish.
• OCR was developed to allow machines to comprehend scanned documents and make soft copies.
• OCR analyses the content of a scanned document and translates the characters into computer-readable language, allowing the text to be translated into a digital or soft copy format similar to a word processor document that may be updated, formatted, searched, and interpreted by users.
• Thus, the gadget identifies remarks and characters on a scanned document or digital representations of actual handwritten or printed handwritten records by utilising the optical features of words and phrases presented on a scanned sheet of paper.

How does OCR Operate?

• The scanner is used to scan actual paper.
• After scanning the text, the computer analyses its layout and converts it to a coloured or black-and-white copy.
• The scanned file is evaluated for light and dark regions.
• The black areas are categorised as characters, whereas the light zone is characterised as the background.

OCR software may differ in its approaches, but it typically examines one character, word, or group of characters at a time and then classifies characters using one of the two algorithms shown below.

Pattern recognition

OCR software is built by feeding text instances with different fonts and formats in order for it to recognise and adequately identify the structure or design of letters.

Feature Detection

In these strategies, OCR programmes rely on the functionality of a character or a number. The number of angled lines, crossing lines, or curves in character could be one of the qualities. For example, in the centre, the letter ‘A’ can be kept as two lines joined at one end and attached to a horizontal line.