Quick Tutorial on Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technique that blends aspects of computer vision and natural language processing that allows one to extract and even interpret text from images. These images can be derived from a variety of sources like scanned documents, pictures of billboards, etc. which makes OCR an extremely powerful method that is useful in applications ranging from healthcare to business and many others.
OCR algorithms work by analyzing the patterns and shapes within an image and mapping each of these shapes and patterns to a text character. For instance, think of the letter “A” and the many different ways in which it can be written and expressed. OCR algorithms allow you to identify all these different forms of the letter within your image and give you the different instances of its appearance.
In this piece, I’ll show a quick tutorial on how OCR can be performed on a picture that should allow you to get started on your own projects. I’ll walk you through the process of performing this and point out some potential complications that you might run into and how to deal with them.
