Optical Character Recognition (OCR)  is the translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. OCR software works by analyzing a document and comparing it with fonts stored in its database and by noting features typical to characters.OCR software identifies characters by comparing shapes to those stored in the software library.The software tries to get the Original page layout  and identifies the words using character proximity.OCR software is used for digital photographs, printed books, documents, visting cards etc.Most of the OCR software supports image formats like JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIP and converts it into HTML, TEXT, PDF versions.

Top 5 free OCR tools to convert your images into text are :

#1 Microsoft Office Onenote :Microsoft Office is already installed on our systems.Onenote is a tool in Microsoft Office.Just follow these simple steps and you are done.

• Drag a scan or a saved picture into OneNote. You can also use OneNote to clip part of the screen or an image into OneNote.

• Now right click on the picture which you have inserted and select Copy Text from Picture. And then paste it into any program like MS Word or Notepad.

#2 FreeOCR.net 3.0 - FreeOCR is a useful tool for scanning and extracting text from images and PDFs. FreeOCR is a complete scan OCR program. It is very accurate and uses the open source Tesseract OCR Engine.It supports scanning from most Twain scanners,fax documents and multipage Tiff images as well as popular image file formats. FreeOCR is simple to install and easy to use software.

You can download it from here

#3 SimpleOCR  : SimpleOCR is a free OCR application and royalty-free API for converting scanned images to editable formats like Microsoft Word.It includes TWAIN scanning, ability to manually specify text and image zones,  interactive correction with suggestions from dictionary, output to plain text or RTF (MS Word) formats etc.It has a Huge Dictionary consisting of English and French dictionaries.SimpleOCR has the ability to capture and retain pictures from the document.
You can download it from here

#4 Image to OCR Converter :Image to OCR converter is a text recognition software and it supoorts bmp, pdf, tif, jpg, gif, png and other image formats.Image or any document can be converted into text formats in one click by using this software.Image to OCR converter works with more than 40 languages.It preserves text,tables,Graphics & Layout of multi-page documents.
You can download it from here .

#5  TopOCR :TopOCR is a high performance OCR system designed specifically for digital cameras.TopOCR is srprisingly accurate and it has a good accuracy rate of 99.8% with a 3 Megapixel camera or above.The software supports jpeg,tiff, gif and bmp formats.Text output can be saved in one of several formats including PDF. It has a full featured image and text editor and more over the software works with 11 languages.
You can download it from here .