A Detailed Analysis of Optical Character Recognition Technology

In many different fields, there is a high demand for storing information to a computer storage disk from the data available in printed or handwritten documents or images to later re-utilize this information by means of computers. One simple way to store information to a computer system from these printed documents could be first to scan the documents and then store them as image files. But to re-utilize this information, it would very difficult to read or query text or other information from these image files. Therefore a technique to automatically retrieve and store information, in particular text, from image files is needed. Optical character recognition is an active research area that attempts to develop a computer system with the ability to extract and process text from images automatically. The objective of OCR is to achieve modification or conversion of any form of text or text-containing documents such as handwritten text, printed or scanned text images, into an editable digital format for deeper and further processing. Therefore, OCR enables a machine to automatically recognize text in such documents. Some major challenges need to be recognized and handled in order to achieve a successful automation. The font characteristics of the characters in paper documents and quality of images are only some of the recent challenges. Due to these challenges, characters sometimes may not be recognized correctly by computer system. In this paper we investigate OCR in four different ways. First we give a detailed overview of the challenges that might emerge in OCR stages. Second, we review the general phases of an OCR system such as pre-processing, segmentation, normalization, feature extraction, classification and post-processing. Then, we highlight developments and main applications and uses of OCR and finally, a brief OCR history are discussed. Therefore, this discussion provides a very comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art of the field.