Tesseract

Tesseract

Tesseract is an open source optical character recognition (OCR) engine. It can recognize text in images and convert it into editable text. It supports over 100 languages and can handle distorted or low-quality images.
Tesseract image
ocr image-recognition text-extraction

Tesseract: Open Source OCR Engine

Recognize text in images, convert to editable text, support for over 100 languages and handling of distorted or low-quality images

What is Tesseract?

Tesseract is an optical character recognition (OCR) engine that was originally developed by Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s and open sourced in 2005. It is now maintained by Google.

Tesseract allows for the recognition of printed text in images, such as scanned documents and photos. It can handle a variety of image formats including JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and PDF. Once Tesseract has processed an image, it outputs recognized text in common document formats such as HTML or plain text.

Some key features and capabilities of Tesseract:

  • Supports over 100 languages for OCR
  • Handles distorted, low resolution, or noisy images
  • Adaptive page layout analysis for handling skewed or non-straight images
  • Trained data sets for improved recognition accuracy
  • Plugins and APIs for integrating into other applications
  • Command line interface as well as wrappers for using in scripts and programming languages

Tesseract is used by several major technology companies in their OCR and document scanning products. It sees broad use in the open source community as a free alternative to expensive commercial OCR software. Overall, Tesseract provides capable and accurate OCR that can handle real-world cases such as imperfect scans and images.

Tesseract Features

Features

  1. Optical character recognition
  2. Supports over 100 languages
  3. Can handle distorted or low-quality images
  4. Open source
  5. Command line interface
  6. Can output plain text, HOCR, PDF, etc.

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Free and open source

Accurate OCR even on low quality images

Supports many languages

Can be customized and extended

Actively maintained and improved

Cons

Requires some technical skill to set up and use

Lower accuracy on handwritten or artistic fonts

Limited built-in formatting options for output text

Not as user friendly as commercial OCR products


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