optical character recognition

from The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)

Optical Character Recognition
OCR

   <text> (OCR, sometimes /oh'k*/) Recognition of printed or
   written characters by computer.  Each page of text is
   converted to a digital using a {scanner} and OCR is then
   applied to this image to produce a text file.  This involves
   complex {image processing} {algorithms} and rarely achieves
   100% accuracy so manual proof reading is recommended.

   (1999-08-26)