Python Tesseract

Python-tesseract is an optical character recognition (OCR) tool for python. That is, it will recognize and "read" the text embedded in images.

Python-tesseract is a wrapper for Google's Tesseract-OCR Engine. It is also useful as a stand-alone invocation script to tesseract, as it can read all image types supported by the Python Imaging Library, including jpeg, png, gif, bmp, tiff, and others, whereas tesseract-ocr by default only supports tiff and bmp. Additionally, if used as a script, Python-tesseract will print the recognized text in stead of writing it to a file. Support for confidence estimates and bounding box data is planned for future releases.

USAGE

try:
    import Image
except ImportError:
    from PIL import Image
import pytesseract

pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = '<full_path_to_your_tesseract_executable>'
# Include the above line, if you don't have tesseract executable in your PATH
# Example tesseract_cmd: 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Tesseract-OCR\\tesseract'

print(pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('test.png')))
print(pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('test-european.jpg'), lang='fra'))

Add the following config, if you have tessdata error like: "Error opening data file..."

tessdata_dir_config = '--tessdata-dir "<replace_with_your_tessdata_dir_path>"'
# Example config: '--tessdata-dir "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Tesseract-OCR\\tessdata"'
# It's important to add double quotes around the dir path.

pytesseract.image_to_string(image, lang='chi_sim', config=tessdata_dir_config)

INSTALLATION

Prerequisites:

• Python-tesseract requires python 2.5+ or python 3.x
• You will need the Python Imaging Library (PIL) (or the Pillow fork). Under Debian/Ubuntu, this is the package python-imaging or python3-imaging.
• Install Google Tesseract OCR (additional info how to install the engine on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows). You must be able to invoke the tesseract command as tesseract. If this isn't the case, for example because tesseract isn't in your PATH, you will have to change the "tesseract_cmd" variable at the top of tesseract.py. Under Debian/Ubuntu you can use the package tesseract-ocr. For Mac OS users. please install homebrew package tesseract.

Installing via pip:

See the pytesseract package page.

$ (env)> pip install pytesseract

Installing from source:

$> git clone https://github.com/madmaze/pytesseract.git
$ (env)> cd pytesseract && pip install .

LICENSE

Python-tesseract is released under the GPL v3.

CONTRIBUTERS

• Originally written by Samuel Hoffstaetter
• Juarez Bochi
• Matthias Lee
• Lars Kistner