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OCR Basics

What Is OCR? How Image to Text Technology Works

Editorial Team ·

OCR stands for optical character recognition: technology that finds text in an image and turns it into characters a computer can edit and search. Every time you copy text from a screenshot, scan a document into an editable file or search a scanned PDF, OCR is doing the work.

How OCR works, step by step

  • Pre-processing: the image is cleaned up. It is resized, straightened if it's tilted or upside down, and adjusted for contrast.
  • Text detection: the engine finds every region that contains text and draws a box around each line.
  • Recognition: each line is read by a neural network that predicts the most likely sequence of characters.
  • Layout: the recognised lines are put back in reading order, keeping table rows together and reading columns one at a time.

What changed with AI

Older OCR compared each letter to stored shapes and struggled with anything that wasn't clean, printed text. Modern OCR uses deep learning models trained on millions of real images, so it copes far better with phone photos, unusual fonts, coloured backgrounds and even neat handwriting. These models are now small enough to run in a web browser, which is how our image to text converter works without uploading your images.

Where OCR is used

  • Copying text from screenshots, photos and scanned documents.
  • Digitising receipts and invoices for expenses and accounting.
  • Making scanned books and PDFs searchable.
  • Reading number plates, forms and ID documents.
  • Helping blind and low-vision people with screen readers.
  • Translating signs and menus with a phone camera.

OCR in Indian languages

Hindi, Marathi and other Indian languages use scripts like Devanagari, with connected letters and vowel signs above and below the line, which makes them harder for OCR than English. Support has improved a lot, and documents that mix Hindi and English, which is common on bills and forms, can now be read together. Try it with our Hindi image to text tool.

How accurate is OCR?

On clean printed text, modern OCR gets well over 95% of characters right. Accuracy drops with blur, poor lighting, tiny text and messy handwriting. Our guide on improving OCR accuracy shows how to get the best results.

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