Tesseract: An Open Source OCR Engine
Tesseract is a powerful optical character recognition (OCR) engine that can recognize and extract text from images and documents[2][3]. Originally developed by Hewlett-Packard between 1985 and 1994, it is now maintained as an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license[2].
Key features of Tesseract include:
- Support for over 100 languages out of the box[2]
- Unicode (UTF-8) compatibility[2]
- Ability to process various image formats like PNG, JPEG, and TIFF[2]
- Multiple output formats including plain text, hOCR (HTML), PDF, TSV, ALTO, and PAGE[2]
Tesseract employs two OCR engines:
- A legacy engine focused on character pattern recognition
- A newer neural network (LSTM) based engine that excels at line recognition[2]
While Tesseract is primarily a command-line tool, it can be integrated into other applications through its API[3]. Developers can use Tesseract to add OCR capabilities to their software projects.
To achieve optimal results, users should consider image quality, as clearer images tend to produce more accurate text recognition[2]. Additionally, Tesseract can be trained to recognize specific fonts or languages, enhancing its versatility for specialized OCR tasks[2].
Tesseract’s robust feature set, multi-language support, and open-source nature make it a valuable tool for a wide range of OCR applications, from digitizing printed documents to extracting text from images for further processing.
Further Reading
1. Is there any way to capture any type of formatting?
2. tesseract/README.md at main · tesseract-ocr/tesseract · GitHub
3. tessdoc/README.md at main · tesseract-ocr/tessdoc · GitHub
4. tessdoc | Tesseract documentation
5. TESSERACT – HackMD