Welcome to the world of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with Tesseract! This blog serves as a user-friendly guide to understand, install, and run Tesseract OCR effectively. Whether you are a developer or an enthusiast, this article will walk you through each step with clarity.
About Tesseract OCR
Tesseract is an advanced OCR engine primarily implemented as a library called libtesseract and complemented by a command line program called tesseract. With the launch of Tesseract 4, a remarkable neural network-based engine (LSTM) was introduced, focusing on line recognition yet maintaining compatibility with the earlier Tesseract 3. It supports over 100 languages out of the box, along with various image formats such as PNG, JPEG, and TIFF.
Brief History
Originally developed by Hewlett-Packard between 1985 and 1994, Tesseract went through several enhancements and open-sourcing in 2005. It has been nurtured by Google from 2006 until 2018, with the current version being the stable Tesseract 5, which started with release 5.0.0 on November 30, 2021.
Installing Tesseract
You have two options for installation:
Please make sure you have a compatible compiler installed if you choose to build from the source.
Running Tesseract
To execute Tesseract, the basic command structure is as follows:
tesseract imagename outputbase [-l lang] [--oem ocrenginemode] [--psm pagesegmode] [configfiles...]To see a full list of command line options, you can run tesseract --help or man tesseract. For detailed examples, check the documentation.
For Developers
Developers can harness the capabilities of libtesseract through its C and C++ APIs available at:
If you are looking for language bindings, refer to the wrapper section.
Troubleshooting
While using Tesseract, you might face some issues. Here are some common troubleshooting tips:
- Poor OCR Results: Make sure the input image quality is optimal. You may need to improve the quality of the image you are processing.
- Error Messages: If you encounter error messages, check if the necessary trained data files are present, especially if using legacy engine modes.
- Command Not Found: Ensure that Tesseract is properly installed and added to your system PATH.
For more insights, updates, or to collaborate on AI development projects, stay connected with fxis.ai.
License
The code in this repository is under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Please be aware that Tesseract utilizes the Leptonica library, which is under a BSD 2-clause license.
At fxis.ai
At fxis.ai, we believe that such advancements are crucial for the future of AI, as they enable more comprehensive and effective solutions. Our team is continually exploring new methodologies to push the envelope in artificial intelligence, ensuring that our clients benefit from the latest technological innovations.