OCR converts images of text, scans, photos, PDFs, into machine-readable characters. Classic OCR read clean print; modern AI-era OCR, powered by vision-language
Optical Character Recognition converts images of text, scans, photos, PDFs, into machine-readable characters. Classic OCR read clean print; modern AI-era OCR, powered by vision-language models, handles handwriting, poor scans, complex layouts, and embedded tables.
Because OCR is the entry gate of document AI: extraction quality downstream is bounded by recognition quality upstream. That is why document pipelines benchmark OCR per document class before anything else.