ModelRefs / OCR (Optical Character Recognition) — AI Glossary
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) — AI Glossary
Converting images of text (scanned documents, photos, screenshots) into machine-readable text for downstream processing.
Overview
Modern OCR (Tesseract, AWS Textract, Google Document AI, Azure Form Recognizer) uses convolutional neural networks and transformer models. Vision-language models (GPT-4o, Claude) perform OCR natively without preprocessing. Critical pipeline step for document processing RAG: scanned PDFs require OCR before chunking and embedding.
Reference details
| Topic | applications |
|---|---|
| Also known as | optical character recognition, document OCR |
| Last reviewed | 2026-06-24 |
Related terms
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Frequently asked questions
What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition)?
Converting images of text (scanned documents, photos, screenshots) into machine-readable text for downstream processing.
Is OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the same as optical character recognition?
Yes — optical character recognition, document OCR are common aliases for OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
What concepts are related to OCR (Optical Character Recognition)?
Closely related concepts include document processing, document qa, docvqa.