
According to the Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) official study guide and the Microsoft Learn module “Identify features of common AI workloads”, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a Computer Vision technology that detects and extracts printed or handwritten text from images and scanned documents. OCR allows organizations and individuals to convert physical or image-based text into machine-readable, editable, and searchable digital text.
In the context of this question, a historian working with old newspaper articles or archival documents would use OCR to digitize printed content. For instance, the historian can scan or photograph old newspaper pages, and then use an OCR tool—such as Azure Computer Vision’s OCR API—to automatically recognize and extract the textual content from those images. This process enables the historian to store, edit, and analyze the content digitally without manually typing everything.
OCR works by using deep learning algorithms trained on thousands of text samples. The system analyzes patterns, shapes, and spatial relationships of characters to identify text accurately, even from low-quality or aged paper documents. Once extracted, the digital text can be indexed, translated, or processed further using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for content analysis.
Now, addressing the other options:
Facial analysis is used to detect emotions, age, or gender from human faces—irrelevant to text digitization.
Image classification identifies entire images by categories (e.g., cat, car, flower).
Object detection identifies and locates multiple objects within an image but doesn’t extract text.
Therefore, per the AI-900 learning objectives under the Computer Vision workload, the correct and verified completion is: