Optical Character Recognition

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) electronically converts images of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-encoded, searchable data.

OCR is a critical data entry method, transforming physical documents (invoices, passports, bank statements) into editable, digital text. The process involves image preprocessing (de-skewing, binarization), feature extraction, and pattern recognition to identify characters. Modern systems, like Google's open-source Tesseract or deep learning models, achieve high accuracy rates, often exceeding 98% on clean printed text. Key applications include automating data extraction from business documents, creating searchable PDFs, and enabling automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) in traffic systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition