Editing Optical character recognition (section)

{{Short description|Computer recognition of visual text}}
{{EngvarB|date=January 2019}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=January 2019}}
[[File:Portable scanner and OCR (video).webm|thumb|300px|Video of the process of scanning and real-time optical character recognition (OCR) with a portable scanner]]

'''Optical character recognition''' or '''optical character reader''' ('''OCR''') is the [[electronics|electronic]] or [[machine|mechanical]] conversion of [[image]]s 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).<ref>{{cite web|title=OCR Document|website=[[HP Autonomy#Products and services|Haven OnDemand]]|url=https://dev.havenondemand.com/apis/ocrdocument#overview|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160415060125/https://dev.havenondemand.com/apis/ocrdocument|archive-date=April 15, 2016}}</ref>

Widely used as a form of [[data entry]] from printed paper data records{{snd}}whether passport documents, invoices, [[bank statement]]s, computerized receipts, business cards, mail, printed data, or any suitable documentation{{snd}}it is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, displayed online, 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 accuracy for most fonts are now common, and with support for a variety of [[image file format]] inputs.<ref>{{cite web|title=Supported Media Formats|website=Haven OnDemand|url=https://dev.havenondemand.com/docs/ImageFormats.html|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160419063444/https://dev.havenondemand.com/docs/ImageFormats.html|archive-date=April 19, 2016}}</ref> Some systems are capable of reproducing formatted output that closely approximates the original page including images, columns, and other non-textual components.