Zonal OCR is the process by which Optical Character Recognition

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

 (OCR)http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/o/optical_character_recognition.htm applications "read" specifically zoned text from a scanned image. Many batch document imaging

Document imaging

Document imaging is an information technology category for systems capable of replicating documents commonly used in business. Document imaging systems can take many forms including microfilm, on demand printers, facsimile machines, copiers, multifunction printers, document scanners, computer...

applications allow the end user to identify and draw a "zone" on a sample image to be recognized. Once the zone has been established on the sample image, this zone will be applied to each image processed so that the data can be extracted from the image file and converted to a ASCII format.

Zonal OCR helps to automate data extraction from digital images. However, zonal OCR, and OCR in general, is not entirely accurate and review of the extracted data will be required.

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