OCR,  Optical character recognition. It’s a mechanical or electronic translation of images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine vision. Though academic research in the field continues, the focus on OCR has shifted to implementation of proven techniques.

Optical character recognition and digital character recognition (using scanners and computer algorithms) were originally considered separate fields. There are lots of OCR softwares available today, some are FREE and some are paid. Here in this Post, I have compiled a list of online Sites that do provide FREE OCR Service.

1. Online OCR Service - OnlineOCR.net is a web-based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service that allows you to convert scanned images and documents into editable Word, Text, Excel, PDF, Html output formats.

2. Cvision – With this website you can upload an image and get your text results all online. It supports the following formats: PDF, TIFF, JPG, and BMP.

3. Free OCR – Free-OCR.com is a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool. You can use this to perform OCR on any image you supply.

4. NewOCR.com – Its a free online OCR (optical character recognition) service, that recognizes multilingual text from a scanned document or photo, handles image files in different formats, can process 29 languages and supports layout analysis, which means that it can interpret multi-column text.