What is Optical Character Recognition?

Optical Character Recognition (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 or from subtitle text superimposed on an image. It is commonly used to digitize printed texts so that they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, and used in machine processes such as cognitive computing, machine translation, text-to-speech, key data and text mining.