OCR – Optical Character Recognition

AI-powered Onscreen Text Recognition

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that enables the digitization of scanned images with printed or handwritten text into machine-readable data that can later be used for electronic editing. Squish includes this technology as a compliment to its already powerful Object-based and Image-based recognition methods, offering it as a method of onscreen text recognition and verification.

Variability in a component’s visual appearance is particularly prominent for onscreen text when trying to create platform-independent tests, due to a wide assortment of fonts, font sizes, decorations and rendering modes. Thus, Image-based recognition methods, including Fuzzy Image Search, are generally unsuitable for locating text onscreen. OCR allows for efficient text handling in those scenarios where the same text is rendered with different parameters, making it look largely dissimilar in pixel-to-pixel comparison (i.e., due to varying letter widths, different kerning or shifting line break positions).