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Optical character recognition (OCR) is the translation of optically scanned bitmaps of printed or written text characters into character codes, such as ASCII. This is an efficient way to turn hard-copy materials into data files that can be edited and otherwise manipulated on a computer.
SUPPOSE YOU wanted to digitize the novel Moby Dick overnight.
You could stay up all night typing and still not finish. Or you could use a high-end scanner and in minutes scan all of author Herman Melville's works into a computer using optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
This is the technology long used by libraries and government agencies to make lengthy documents quickly available electronically. Advances in OCR technology have spurred its increasing use by enterprises.
For many document-input tasks, OCR is the most costeffective and speedy method available. And each year, the technology frees acres of storage space once given over to file cabinets and boxes full of paper documents.
Before OCR can be used, the source material must be scanned using an optical scanner (and sometimes a specialized circuit board in the PC) to read in the page as a bitmap (a pattern of dots). Software to recognize the images is also required.
The OCR software then processes these scans to differentiate between images and text and determine what letters are represented...