What is OCR?
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the technology that converts images of text into machine-readable digital text. It is used in document digitisation, data entry automation, and accessibility tools.
What is OCR?
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the process of extracting text from images.
When you photograph a sign, receipt, business card, or book page and your phone converts it to editable text — that is OCR.
OCR is used in:
- Document scanning and digitisation
- Automated data entry from forms and invoices
- Number plate (license plate) reading
- Bank cheque processing
- Translating text in photos
- Accessibility tools that read text aloud from images
- Archiving historical documents
The most widely used open-source OCR engine is Tesseract, originally developed by HP and now maintained by Google. Python's pytesseract library provides a simple interface to Tesseract.
Machine Learning follows a structured pipeline from data to deployment
OCR Quick Start
# Installation (run in terminal):
# pip install pytesseract pillow
# Also install Tesseract OCR engine:
# Windows: download installer from https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/wiki
# Linux: sudo apt install tesseract-ocr
# macOS: brew install tesseract
import pytesseract
from PIL import Image
import cv2
# For Windows, tell pytesseract where Tesseract is installed:
# pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = r'C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe'
# Read text from an image using PIL
image = Image.open("document.jpg")
text = pytesseract.image_to_string(image)
print("Extracted text:")
print(text)
# Read text from an OpenCV image
cv_image = cv2.imread("document.jpg")
text_from_cv = pytesseract.image_to_string(cv_image)
print("\nText from OpenCV image:")
print(text_from_cv[:200])