Literally, OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It is a widespread technology to recognize text inside images, such as scanned documents and photos. OCR technology is used to convert virtually any kind of images containing written text (typed, handwritten, or printed) into machine-readable, searchable text data.
Probably the most well-known use cases for OCR is converting printed paper documents into machine-readable text documents. Once a scanned paper document went through OCR processing, the text of the document can be edited with word processors like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Before OCR technology was available, the only option to digitize printed paper documents was to manually re-typing the text. Not only was the massively time-consuming, but it also came with inaccuracy and typing errors.
OCR is often used as a backend technology, powering many well-known systems and services in our daily life. Less known, but as important, use cases for OCR technology include data entry automation, indexing documents for search engines, automatic number plate recognition, as well as the BARCODE recognition.
OCR technology has proven immensely useful in digitizing historic newspapers and texts that have now been converted into fully searchable formats and had made accessing those earlier texts easier and faster.
In the Middle East, ABBYY is renowned for the best-in-class Arabic OCR and full-fledged Arabic Data Capture technology.
Supporting totally of 190+ recognition languages, ABBYY products capture documents of any type and format from any source.
Depending on your needs, ABBYY can convert documents into searchable PDFs, save them in editable formats or automatically extract only particular fields and index documents, saving them as XLS, XML or CSV files.
Featuring additional semi-automatic verification of questionable data and open API, ABBYY exports processed documents and data with 100% accuracy into any 3rd party applications.