What is OCR?

Optical Character Recognition(OCR) is the process of electronically extracting text from images or any documents like PDF and reusing it in a variety of ways such as full text searches.

In this blog, we will see, how to use 'Python-tesseract', an OCR tool for python.

pytesseract:

It will recognize and read the text present in images. It can read all image types - png, jpeg, gif, tiff, bmp etc. It’s widely used to process everything from scanned documents.

Installation:

$ sudo pip install pytesseract

Requirements:

* Requires python 2.5 or later versions.
* And requires Python Imaging Library(PIL).

Usage:

From the shell:

$ ./pytesseract.py test.png

Above command prints the recognized text from image 'test.png'.

$ ./pytesseract.py -l eng test-english.jpg

Above command recognizes english text.

In Python Script:

import Image
from tesseract import image_to_string

print image_to_string(Image.open('test.png'))
print image_to_string(Image.open('test-english.jpg'), lang='eng')

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