Optical Character Recognition
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that converts different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files, or images captured by a digital camera, into editable and searchable data. It works by analyzing the shapes and patterns of characters in an image and translating them into machine-encoded text. This enables automated data extraction from physical or digital documents without manual typing.
Developers should learn OCR when building applications that require digitizing printed text, automating document processing, or extracting information from images for data analysis. Common use cases include invoice processing, receipt scanning, license plate recognition, digitizing historical archives, and creating accessible content for visually impaired users by converting text to speech.