Free Online OCR Image to Text Converter

What Is OCR

OCR stands for optical character recognition. It is the process of converting images of typed or printed text into editable text your computer can read. Any text within an image file can be extracted with OCR. Common uses of OCR include digitizing books and magazines, automating data entry, or simply extracting text from documents eliminating manually re-typing.

Some methods of OCR use pattern matching to extract text from images. These types OCR systems scan over the image and attempt match a known symbol to the region of the image being scanned. Pattern matching OCR systems perform well against text of specific typewritten fonts. Other OCR systems break down parts of the image by classifying their features. The features identified by these OCR systems are then compared to known shapes to detect the characters of the text present in the image. Feature based OCR systems can perform well on handwritten text and fonts it was not originally trained to recognize. For a more detailed breakdown, see how OCR works.