OCR Free
This online tool is a free optical character recognition (OCR) app that allows you to convert documents and images to text. It supports more than 100 file formats and the world's most widespread languages.
How to extract text from your files using OCR?
- Select a file.
- After processing, the text will appear in the text area.
- Press the download button to download the text as a file.
- A tip to recognise and extract text in different languages: navigate to the page version in the language corresponding to the text to be extracted. For example, if you have an image containing text in Hebrew, select your image from the Hebrew version of the site: https://read-text.com/he.
What is OCR?
OCR (optical character recognition) is in effect text recognition. It is a software process that recognizes and extracts text from documents in non-text formats such as images (JPG, PNG, BMP, etc.) and PDFs. It has the ability to “read” the text in images, in other words to convert the image of a word into its actual text characters. This allows a user to easily copy or edit the original text in documents as opposed to having to manually transcribe the text.
How does optical character recognition work?
Optical character recognition typically preprocesses an image by desaturating and contrasting it to optimise the contrast between the dark and light areas. All that which is black is thereby considered as characters and that which is white is taken to be a background to those characters. Then pattern recognition algorithms and other methods including feature detection are used to recognize the visual structure of the text in the image: from paragraphs, to lines, sentences, words, and so on all the way to single characters. These processes now often use artificial intelligence which can learn to recognize text in image by practising on thousands of images with text in different fonts, size and languages.
What are the benefits of using OCR?
The advantage of using optical character recognition is obviously the time it saves in digitising the text in images. Compare the time it takes to manually retype the text from a book to scanning the book and processing the scans with an OCR software that can extract the text in a matter of seconds.
How we handle your files
The files you select are sent over the internet to our servers in order to perform OCR on them.
The files sent to our servers are immediately deleted after the conversion has completed or failed.
HTTPS encryption is used when sending your files and when downloading the text extracted from those files.
Features
No software installation
This online app is entirely based in your web browser, no software installation is required.
Free to use
You can use this free app as many time as you want without registration.
All devices supported
It works on any device that has a web browser including mobile phones, tablets and desktop computers.