OCR Control Overview

Use the NIOCR control to perform optical character recognition (OCR). OCR is the process by which machine vision software reads text and/or characters in an image. OCR consists of the following two procedures:

• Training characters
• Reading characters

Training characters is the process by which you teach the machine vision software the types of characters and/or patterns you want to read in the image during the reading procedure. You can use NI OCR to train any number of characters, creating a character set, which is the set of characters that you later compare with objects during the reading procedure. You store the character set you create in a character set file. Training might be a one-time process, or it might be a process you repeat several times, creating several character sets to broaden the scope of characters you want to detect in an image.

Reading characters is the process by which the machine vision application you create analyzes an image to determine if the objects match the characters you trained. The machine vision application reads characters in an image using the character set that you created when you trained characters.