What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition)?
OCR, Optical Character Recognition, is technology that reads text out of images — converting a photographed document, a scanned page or a video frame into editable, searchable text. Modern OCR engines handle printed text in many languages, including Hindi and Gujarati, and increasingly cope with skewed angles, low contrast and moderate blur that would have defeated older systems.
Business uses in India are everywhere: digitising piles of paper invoices into Excel, extracting Aadhaar or PAN details from photos during customer onboarding, and making scanned agreements searchable. In CCTV work, OCR reads number plates, shop boards and container codes from footage, and extracts burned-in timestamps from DVR exports. Accuracy depends heavily on image quality, so preprocessing — straightening, sharpening, boosting contrast — is often half the job.