OCR means Optical Character Recognition.There are many online and offline OCR tools to extract the text from any image or scanned object.But this feature is available now in Google Docs. Google Docs can perform OCR and turn the images in an editable document(Latin Character Set only).
Related: Google Docs as a Batch PDF Converter.
You can upload a scanned object or an image containing printed texts. This utility has been added to Google Docs recently.
In the following example you can see that Google Docs has successfully converted the Image document in editable text document.
Though the OCR feature has not been integrated in The Google Docs UI,you can still convert your image documents to editable text documents.
How to use Google Doc as OCR
The OCR utility is recently added to Google Docs.So OCR is not available in The Google Docs UI.But You can use this feature using the sample form.
Procedure:
- After browsing the sample form it will prompt for “Sign In to Google Docs” account.
- Now you should grant access to upload the pictures in Google Docs.
- Browse the image files which you want to convert into text format from your computer.
- Now Click the Start OCR Import button.
The server will immediately try to extract the texts from the image.The quality of the extracted text may be not perfect yet.A good image regulation may provide the good result. Google is trying hard to provide a better performance.
You can also extract the text from noisy image.But the extracted text is not very accurate.
If you are developer,you can perform OCR on a .png, .jpg, or .gif upload, adding the ocr=true parameter onto your upload request:
POST /feeds/default/private/full?ocr=true HTTP/1.1
[via Google Code]
You can also perform OCR in Google Search.But it only support to perform OCR on PDF file format where Google Docs Support all type of images.
Update:
Now the OCR feature is available at Google Docs. Yo can extract text from any image using Google Docs OCR feature. Just sign-in to Google Docs and upload the image. Now click “Convert text from uploaded PDG and image files” option. You are done!! Google Docs will extract the text from the image you uploaded.
Good one..