fallback python-based .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif extraction

[deanmalmgren]

These parsers currently use the tesseract shell command to extract content from image files. This is a great starting point (!!!), but it might be nice to replicate the behavior of the .pdf parser and have a pure python fallback method to make textract more usable across platforms. From a minute of googling around, it doesn't look like there are any real packages that do this, but scikit-learn does have some examples of doing character classification that might be useful:

• http://scikit-learn.org/0.10/auto_examples/plot_digits_classification.html
• http://scikit-learn.org/0.10/auto_examples/manifold/plot_lle_digits.html

This sounds like a pretty serious undertaking (and not terribly urgent given the relative portability of the tesseract-ocr package) but I thought I'd create this issue for posterity in case someone knows of a python-based fallback that would be appropriate in these situations.