Introduction
Character recognition, usually abbreviated to optical character recognition or shortened OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text. It is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine vision. Though academic research in the field continues, the focus on character recognition has shifted to implementation of proven techniques. For many document-input tasks, character recognition is the most cost-effective and speedy method available. And each year, the technology frees acres of storage space once given over to file cabinets and boxes full of paper documents.
Neural networks, with their remarkable ability to derive meaning from complicated or imprecise data, can be used to extract patterns and detect trends that are too complex to be noticed by either humans or other computer techniques. A trained neural network can be thought of as an "expert" in the category of information it has been given to analyze.