OpenCV OCR and text recognition with Tesseract on ubuntu 16.04

Guide

requirements:

ubuntu: 16.04
python: 3.5.2
opencv: 3.4.2+
tesseract: v4 (binary)
pytesseract: 0.2.4 (python bindings)

install python

apt-get install python3-dev python3-pip 
```  

### install opencv 
```bash
workon py3 
pip install opencv-contrib-python
```   

### install tesseract
```bash
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alex-p/tesseract-ocr
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr

The latest release of Tesseract (v4) supports deep learning-based OCR that is significantly more accurate.

The underlying OCR engine itself utilizes a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, a kind of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN).

check

tesseract -v
tesseract 4.0.0-beta.4-138-g2093
  leptonica-1.76.0
  libgif 5.1.4 : libjpeg 8d (libjpeg-turbo 1.4.2) : libpng 1.2.54 : libtiff 4.0.6 : zlib 1.2.8 : libwebp 0.4.4 : libopenjp2 2.1.2
  Found AVX2
  Found AVX
  Found SSE

install Tesseract + Python bindings

1
2
3

workon py3
pip install pytesseract
pip install pillow imutils

tesseract

help

tesseract --help
Usage:
  tesseract --help | --help-extra | --version
  tesseract --list-langs
  tesseract imagename outputbase [options...] [configfile...]

OCR options:
  -l LANG[+LANG]        Specify language(s) used for OCR.
NOTE: These options must occur before any configfile.

Single options:
  --help                Show this help message.
  --help-extra          Show extra help for advanced users.
  --version             Show version information.
  --list-langs          List available languages for tesseract engine.

help-extra

tesseract --help-extra
Usage:
  tesseract --help | --help-extra | --help-psm | --help-oem | --version
  tesseract --list-langs [--tessdata-dir PATH]
  tesseract --print-parameters [options...] [configfile...]
  tesseract imagename|imagelist|stdin outputbase|stdout [options...] [configfile...]

OCR options:
  --tessdata-dir PATH   Specify the location of tessdata path.
  --user-words PATH     Specify the location of user words file.
  --user-patterns PATH  Specify the location of user patterns file.
  -l LANG[+LANG]        Specify language(s) used for OCR.
  -c VAR=VALUE          Set value for config variables.
                        Multiple -c arguments are allowed.
  --psm NUM             Specify page segmentation mode.
  --oem NUM             Specify OCR Engine mode.
NOTE: These options must occur before any configfile.

Page segmentation modes:
  0    Orientation and script detection (OSD) only.
  1    Automatic page segmentation with OSD.
  2    Automatic page segmentation, but no OSD, or OCR.
  3    Fully automatic page segmentation, but no OSD. (Default)
  4    Assume a single column of text of variable sizes.
  5    Assume a single uniform block of vertically aligned text.
  6    Assume a single uniform block of text.
  7    Treat the image as a single text line.
  8    Treat the image as a single word.
  9    Treat the image as a single word in a circle.
 10    Treat the image as a single character.
 11    Sparse text. Find as much text as possible in no particular order.
 12    Sparse text with OSD.
 13    Raw line. Treat the image as a single text line,
       bypassing hacks that are Tesseract-specific.

OCR Engine modes: (see https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki#linux)
  0    Legacy engine only.
  1    Neural nets LSTM engine only.
  2    Legacy + LSTM engines.
  3    Default, based on what is available.

Single options:
  -h, --help            Show minimal help message.
  --help-extra          Show extra help for advanced users.
  --help-psm            Show page segmentation modes.
  --help-oem            Show OCR Engine modes.
  -v, --version         Show version information.
  --list-langs          List available languages for tesseract engine.
  --print-parameters    Print tesseract parameters.

run script

python text_recognition.py --east frozen_east_text_detection.pb \
    --image images/example_01.jpg
[INFO] loading EAST text detector...
OCR TEXT
========
OH OK

Reference

OpenCV OCR and text recognition with Tesseract

History

20180920: created.