Deep Learning Is Blowing up OCR, and Your Field Could be Next

Imagine a computer that can read your handwriting (even if it's as bad as mine). Or one that can read a tiny street sign in a grainy picture you snapped on your phone. Or better yet, one that can do this and immediately translate the results into 100 different languages. In the last few years, all these things suddenly became possible. This is the power of modern, Deep Learning driven Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR is the process of using machine vision, letter recognition and other techniques to automatically extract text from an image.