From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishoptical character recognitionˌoptical ˈcharacter recogˌnition noun [uncountable] technical computer software that recognizes numbers and letters of the alphabet which are written on paper, so that information from paper documents can be scanned (scan) into a computer
Examples from the Corpus
optical character recognition• This could include word processing, a database, case management and optical character recognition.• One example is the method of recognition using template matching which is applied in both speech recognition and optical character recognition.• This can be on-line or off-line recognition of hand-printed characters, or of machine-printed characters using optical character recognition.From Longman Business Dictionaryoptical character recognitionˌoptical ˈcharacter recogˌnition abbreviation OCRCOMPUTING a computer system for automatically recognizing letters and numbers that have been printed or written by hand on paper → recognition 