AI engineering glossary · Computer vision
What is OCR (optical character recognition)?
Optical character recognition (also called OCR): Software that converts images of printed or handwritten text into machine-readable characters. It underlies digitising documents, reading number plates and extracting data from invoices. Accuracy depends on image quality, fonts, language and layout.
Optical character recognition: an example
An OCR tool reads a photo of a GST invoice and returns text such as 'Total: 4,720.00'.
Related terms
More Computer vision terms
- ORB
- Otsu's method
- Padding
- Panoptic segmentation
- Patch embedding
- Pixel
- Pooling layer
- Precision and recall for detection
Where you learn it
Optical character recognition is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.