Abstract
One of the most pervasive processes of modernity is undoubtedly digitalization, which has encompassed all key spheres of human life. The development of information technology has contributed to large-scale changes not only in the everyday aspect of life, but also more globally, automating complex business processes in the field of entrepreneurship, economics, and healthcare. The transition to digital data and documentation has provided greater accessibility to necessary information and has also enhanced the efficiency of its analysis and processing. Due to this fact, optical character recognition (OCR) technology has gained significant importance, enabling the identification and extraction of textual data from images. OCR systems play a pivotal role in the digital transformation of society as they eliminate the need for manual handling of textual information in images and are applicable in automating the majority of business processes associated with paper-based data processing, such as gathering statistical data from paper forms, reflecting paper documents in electronic document management systems, converting textual information into audio files, and so on. This paper is dedicated to describing optical character recognition technology, as well as providing an overview of machine learning techniques that are actively used in the context of its modern implementation, in order to enhance the quality of the obtained results. In addition, the paper presents the principles of operation of the described approaches, their capabilities, as well as some limitations that may be encountered when using them in various scenarios.