TesseractOCR for PHP

A wrapper to work with TesseractOCR inside your PHP scripts. Based on https://github.com/wangoviridans/tesseract-ocr-for-php

Installation

Via composer (https://packagist.org/packages/wangoviridans/tesseract_ocr)

{
    "require": {
        "wangoviridans/tesseract_ocr": ">= 0.0.1"
    }
}

Or just clone and put somewhere inside your project folder.

$ cd myapp/vendor
$ git clone git://github.com/wangoviridans/tesseract-ocr-for-php.git

Dependencies

• TesseractOCR

IMPORTANT: Make sure that the tesseract binary is on your $PATH. If you're running PHP on a webserver, the user may be not you, but _www or similar. If you need, there is always the possibility of modify your $PATH:

$path = getenv('PATH');
putenv("PATH=$path:/usr/local/bin");

Usage

Basic usage

<?php
require_once '/path/to/src/TesseractOCR.php';
//or require_once 'vendor/autoload.php' if you are using composer

$tesseract = new TesseractOCR();
$tesseract->setImage('images/some-words.jpg');
echo $tesseract->recognize();

or

<?php
require_once '/path/to/src/TesseractOCR.php';
//or require_once 'vendor/autoload.php' if you are using composer

$tesseract = new TesseractOCR(array(
    'file.input' => 'images/some-words.jpg'
));
echo $tesseract->recognize();

Defining language

Tesseract has training data for several languages, which certainly improve the accuracy of the recognition.

<?php
require_once '/path/to/src/TesseractOCR.php';
//or require_once 'vendor/autoload.php' if you are using composer

$tesseract = new TesseractOCR('images/sind-sie-deutsch.jpg');
$tesseract->setLanguage('deu'); //same 3-letters code as tesseract training data packages
echo $tesseract->recognize();

or

<?php
require_once '/path/to/src/TesseractOCR.php';
//or require_once 'vendor/autoload.php' if you are using composer

$tesseract = new TesseractOCR(array(
    'file.input' => 'images/sind-sie-deutsch.jpg',
    'language' => 'deu' //same 3-letters code as tesseract training data packages
));
echo $tesseract->recognize();

Inducing recognition

Sometimes tesseract misunderstand some chars, such as:

0 - O
1 - l
j - ,
etc ...

But you can improve recognition accuracy by specifying what kind of chars you're sending, for example:

<?php
$tesseract = new TesseractOCR();
$tesseract->setImage('my-image.jpg')
          ->setWhitelist(range('a','z')); //tesseract will threat everything as downcase letters
echo $tesseract->recognize();

$tesseract = new TesseractOCR();
$tesseract->setImage('my-image.jpg')
          ->setWhitelist(range('A','Z'), range(0,9), '_-@.'); //you can pass as many ranges as you need
echo $tesseract->recognize();

You can even do cool stuff like this one:

<?php
$tesseract = new TesseractOCR();
$tesseract->setImage('my-image.jpg')
          ->setWhitelist(range('A','Z'));
echo $tesseract->recognize(); //will return "GIT"

Troubleshooting

Warnings like Permission denied or No such file or directory

To solve this issue you can specify a custom directory for temp files:

<?php
$tesseract = new TesseractOCR();
$tesseract->setImage('my-image.jpg')
          ->setTempDir('./my-temp-dir');

or

<?php
$tesseract = new TesseractOCR(array(
    'file.input' => 'my-image.jpg',
    'tempDir' => './my-temp-dir'
));