OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a technology used in computer science to convert different types of documents—such as scanned paper documents, PDFs, or images of text—into editable and searchable data. OCR processes an image of text and extracts the letters, numbers, and symbols into a machine-readable format. The technology involves several steps: first, the image is pre-processed to improve clarity (such as removing noise or adjusting brightness). Then, OCR algorithms analyze the image to detect the shapes of characters, often using techniques like template matching or feature-based recognition. The extracted text is then converted into editable formats such as plain text, PDFs, or Word documents. Tesseract OCR is one of the most popular open-source libraries used for this purpose. It supports over 100 languages and can be integrated with various programming languages like Python and Java. OCR technology is widely used in fields such as document digitization, receipt scanning, license plate recognition, and even in assisting visually impaired individuals by reading text aloud. While modern OCR can recognize fonts and handwriting with high accuracy, challenges remain in interpreting complex layouts, noisy images, and handwriting.
What in computer science is OCR?
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