Text Recognition

Definition

Text recognition refers to the identification of text characters in images or scanned documents. It includes printed and handwritten recognition.

Purpose

The purpose is to make text in visual formats accessible and searchable.

Importance

• Enables digitization of archives.
• Critical for accessibility and automation.
• Accuracy depends on image quality.
• Related to OCR technologies.

How It Works

1. Capture scanned or photographed documents.
2. Preprocess images to improve clarity.
3. Detect text regions.
4. Apply recognition models.
5. Output machine-readable text.

Examples (Real World)

• Google Lens: recognizes text in photos.
• ABBYY FineReader: digitizes scanned documents.
• Tesseract OCR: open-source text recognition engine.

References / Further Reading

• Smith, R. “An Overview of the Tesseract OCR Engine.” ICDAR.
• ISO/IEC 15938-4 Standard.
• IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.