The Full form of OCR is Optical Character Recognition. It is also known as an optical text recognition or optical character reader (OCR). It is designed to convert images of documents, or scanned paper documents captured by a digital camera into searchable, readable, and editable data. The scanned page of a printed document can be read and can be displayed on the screen, but it is just a series of white and black dots for the computer, which it cannot recognise.
OCR was developed to enable the computer to produce a soft copy after reading a scanned document. In this process, OCR examines the text and translates the characters of a scanned document into code that makes the text machine-readable so that it can be transformed into a soft copy or an electronic format just like a document that is created with a word processor in which users can read, search, edit, and format. An Optical Character Recognition consists of software and hardware device that is designed to convert printed or physical documents into machine-readable text.
Hardware of OCR (a circuit board or optical scanner) copies and reads the text, whereas the software deals with the advanced processing. The software can also make use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) to use advanced methods like the ability to identify style of handwriting or language.