OCR Assistant

OCR Assistant is a command-line program that utilizes the Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Engine to read and recognize text from an image file.

Prerequisites

To build and run OCR Assistant, you need the following tools:

• CMake (version 3.15 or later)
• A C++ compiler supporting C++17
• vcpkg package manager

Additionally, the project depends on these libraries:

• Tesseract
• Leptonica

Building the Project

1. First, ensure that the Tesseract and Leptonica libraries are installed on your system. If you're using the vcpkg package manager, you can install these libraries with the following commands:

   vcpkg install tesseract
   vcpkg install leptonica

2. Set the CMake toolchain file to the vcpkg.cmake provided by vcpkg. This can be done by setting the CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE variable in the main CMakeLists.txt file:

   set(CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake CACHE STRING "Vcpkg toolchain file")

3. Build the project using CMake:

   mkdir build
   cd build
   cmake ..
   make

Running Tests

Tests are written using the Catch2 testing framework. To run the tests:

cd build/test
./TesseractOCRProviderTests

Configuration

To specify the path to the Tesseract tessdata directory, set TESSDATA_PREFIX path as an environment variable:

    export TESSDATA_PREFIX=/path/to/tessdata/parent/directory

Replace /path/to/tessdata/parent/directory with the actual path to the parent directory of your tessdata folder.

Tesseract language test data can be found: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/blob/main/

Download eng.traineddata for English.

Usage

After building the project, you can use the OCR Assistant as follows:

cd app
./OCRAssistant ../lib/test/tesseract-test-image.png

Replace /path/to/image/file with the path to the image file you want to process. The program will print the recognized text to the console.

Disclaimer

Please note that the accuracy of the text recognition depends on the quality and clarity of the input image.