optical character recognition The electronic identification and digital encoding of printed or handwritten characters by means of an optical scanner and specialized software. |
text
(OCR, sometimes /oh'k*/) Recognition of printed or written characters by computer. Each page of text is converted to a digital using a scanner and OCR is then applied to this image to produce a text file. This involves complex image processing algorithms and rarely achieves 100% accuracy so manual proof reading is recommended.
(1999-08-26)