Optical character recognition (OCR) products are used to read text from paper and translate it into data that can be manipulated by computers. Optical scanners, optical wands, and optical software are examples of optical character recognition (OCR) products. Optical character recognition (OCR) is often confused with digital character recognition, but represents a different technology. Optical character recognition (OCR) products reproduce characters via optical compositing with lenses and mirrors. OCR systems contain many different components; however, the primary mechanism of an OCR system remains the OCR scanner. The most common use of OCR scanners is in reading bar codes that printed on many commercial and consumer products. Another typical use of OCR scanning is in mail-sorting centers.

Optical character recognition (OCR) products are designed to scan a number of different character types, including typewritten, handwritten, cursive, and music notation. The scanned characters are then processed into computers and "picked up" by OCR software, quite often using the TWAIN interface. TWAIN is an acronym for "technology without an interesting name." TWAIN applications are designed to produce forms and other documents in a number of popular extensions including portable document format (PDF), office application formats by proprietary vendors such as Microsoft (e.g., DOC, XLS) and Corel (e.g., WPD, WPS), and image file formats like JPEG, GIF, BMP, and TIFF.

Specialized optical character recognition (OCR) products such as magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) are also available Organizations such as banks are the main adopters of MICR, utilizing the technology for check processing due to the very low read-error rates (approximately 1:30,000). Optical mark recognition (OMR) is another very common type of OCR technology, often used by educational and government facilities for everything from examinations to application forms. The forms are completed by using ink or a No. 2 pencil to fill in squares or circles containing alpha-numeric characters.

Optical character recognition (OCR) products are provided under both general public license (GPL) and by vendors that include hardware components like wands and handheld or machine-mounted scanners, software that performs optical character display, manipulation, and transformation, and OCR software development kit applications.