Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping system in an office, or to publish the text on a website. OCR makes it possible to edit the text, search for a word or phrase, store it more compactly, display or print a copy free of scanning artifacts, and apply techniques such as machine translation, text-to-speech and text mining to it. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision.
OCR or Optical character recognition using a webcam is a bit tricky as the image quality of most webcams is average. However, your webcam can double up as an OCR reader in a pinch. You can take an image using the webcam and then use software like Microsoft Document imaging, Google Docs and Abbyy FineReader Online to convert images to text. You can also try Evernote (free from www.evernote. com).
Evernote is recommended software for OCR since it reads the image from the webcam and converts it into searchable text in real-time. You can use it to save notes, book pages, reports and business cards. Accuracy of converted text varies between 70-90% depending on the image quality and software used for OCR conversion.
