 Optical character recognition. Optical character recognition also optical character reader. OCR is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of type, handwritten or printed text into machine in coded text, whether from a scanned document, the photo of a document, the scene photo for example the text on signs and billboards in A. Landscape photo or from subtitled text superimposed on an image for example from a television broadcast. Widely used as a form of information entry from printed paper data records, weather passport documents, invoices, bank statements, computerized receipts, business cards, mail, printouts of static data, or any suitable documentation. It is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that they can be electronically edited, searched, stored more compactly, displayed online, and used in machine processes such as cognitive computing, machine translation, extracted text to speech, key data and text mining. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision. Early versions needed to be trained with images of each character, and worked on one font at a time. Advanced systems capable of producing a high degree of recognition accuracy for most fonts are now common, and with support for a variety of digital image file format inputs. Some systems are capable of reproducing formatted output that closely approximates the original page including images, columns, and other non-textual components.