Input Devices : OCR

An optical character recognition system consists of a scanner and some software. The scanner is used to scan an image of a page of text to be read into the computer. The software then examines the page and extracts the text from it, storing it in a form that can be processed.

OCR systems can now recognise a wide variety of computer fonts and read letters with over 99% accuracy. Some systems will recognise hand-written text reasonably well as long as it is written very neatly and usually put into boxes on a pre-printed form.

GCSE ICT Companion 04 - (C) P Meakin 2004