Documents
What is OCR?
OCR, optical character recognition, turns pixels of text — scans, screenshots, photos — into strings.
Updated
How it works
- The input is an image or a scanned page.
- A model reads the glyphs and writes text.
- That text can then be chunked and searched like any other string.
What it is not
It is not extracting text already embedded in a digital PDF, and it is not captioning a scene.
OCR: this, and the thing it is confused with
| This | Not this | |
|---|---|---|
| Input | Pixels of writing | A digital PDF with a text layer |
| Output | Characters | A description of the picture |
| Next step | Index the string | Stop at the image |
Where Pixeltable fits
Pixeltable runs OCR as a computed column on an image or document. The string it writes is what later search uses.
Questions
How does OCR work?
The input is an image or a scanned page. A model reads the glyphs and writes text. That text can then be chunked and searched like any other string.
What is OCR often confused with?
It is not extracting text already embedded in a digital PDF, and it is not captioning a scene.
Next step
Install the Pixeltable skill, or sign up for Cloud and run the same file on a hosted database.