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Optical character recognition (OCR) is a means of using software to convert images of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-encoded text, from a number of formats – scanned documents, photos of documents, or even from subtitles, captions, or text superimposed on an image. As a practical matter, OCR is often used to digitally capture books or other documents with consistent and universally recognizable fonts. OCR is often a component of document management software (DMS) that can be used to go paperless. Many readers may use DMS programs to allow them to take a snapshot of transaction receipts with their phones, and the software will capture and categories transactional details like the items purchased and the vendor, directly from the image. Other images that we work with can be tailored to our needs better with OCR. Common examples include Adobe Acrobat document images, which are common for locking down documents into a stable, read-only format, prior to distribution. Using OCR capabilities can allow for more flexible digital archiving, can make them searchable, and can even allow users to copy and paste from the created body of machine-encoded text, once it has been extracted from the image.

Intelligent character recognition (ICR) is a very similar technology, on the surface. It also enables the extraction of text from images. However, it has an added dimension of complexity: the ability to learn more complicated and non-standard fonts, and importantly – even human handwriting. Whereas OCR tends to be appropriate for easily understood typewritten text, being able to learn, recognize, and understand the free-est of free-text forms is another skill altogether. The ability to continuously learn from training data makes it significantly more sophisticated and often more costly to deploy. Organizations that wish to be able to capture and archive large volumes of information from images should evaluate the level of customization and flexibility required to process the target body of data, being conscious of the complexity and costs involved in moving along the capability spectrum from OCR to ICR.