Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the technology used to convert different types of documents — such as scanned paper documents, PDF files, or images captured by a camera — into editable and searchable data. OCR tools allow you to extract text from images quickly and accurately, making them essential for digitizing content.
OCR began in the early 20th century for aiding the visually impaired. As technology advanced, OCR systems became integral in postal services, banking, and enterprise document management. Today’s OCR engines, like Tesseract.js, are powered by AI and deep learning, offering high accuracy even with complex fonts or low-resolution images.
OCR engines analyze image pixels to detect characters and words. They apply pattern recognition, AI models, and linguistic rules to convert image content to text. Tesseract.js, a JavaScript port of Google's Tesseract OCR engine, brings this power to your browser without server-side processing.
OCR struggles with blurry or skewed images, handwriting, or unusual fonts. Improving image quality, preprocessing, or manual corrections help mitigate this. Always review extracted text for accuracy.