Optical Character Recognition (or OCR) is a method for identifying printed characters on a package surface. OCR is ideal for variable text fields, where it may not be possible to know what text string will be on the production line. The system compares a given character image against all the characters in a pre-defined font to find the closest match. Optical Character Verification, on the other hand, is looking for a pre-defined value – it is used to check for the accuracy of a code rather than determine what a code is. More information on the way that OCR and OCV work can be found in our white paper Making Codes Readable.