OCR
in full
optical character recognitionScanning and comparison technique intended to identify printed text or numerical data. It avoids the need to retype already printed material for data entry. OCR software attempts to identify characters by comparing shapes to those stored in the software library. The software tries to identify words using character proximity and will try to reconstruct the original page layout. High accuracy can be obtained by using sharp, clear scans of high-quality originals, but it decreases as the quality of the original declines.
OCR
(Optical Character Recognition) The machine recognition of printed characters. OCR systems can recognize many different OCR fonts, as well as typewriter and computer-printed characters. Advanced OCR systems can recognize hand printing.
When a text document is scanned into the computer, it is turned into a bitmap, which is a picture of the text. OCR software analyzes the light and dark areas of the bitmap in order to identify each alphabetic letter and numeric digit. When it recognizes a character, it converts it into ASCII text (see ASCII file). Hand printing is much more difficult to analyze than machine-printed characters. Old, worn and smudged documents are also difficult. Scanning documents and processing them with OCR is sometimes as much an art as it is a science.
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| OCR Processing |
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| When text documents are scanned, they are "photographed" and stored as pictures in the computer. OCR software converts the pictures into actual text characters, which take up considerably less room on disk. |
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| OCR Machines |
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| The "football field-long" machine (top) from Recognition Equipment, Inc. was used in the 1970s to process checks and credit card slips. The machine at the bottom is a contemporary unit. Both machines can handle OCR and MICR processing. (Images courtesy of BancTec, Inc.) |
