Tesseract OCR Engine

Svetlin Nakov and Veselin Kolev

BASD (Bulgarian Association of Software Developers)

www.devbg.org

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What is OCR?
Stands for Optical Character Recognition
Extracts the text from a given image

What is OCR? (2)

Invented by Gustav Tauschek
Tauschek obtained a patent on OCR
1929 in Germany 1935 in USA

Tauscheks machine
Was a mechanical device
Uses templates, light and photodetector When a light was directed towards the templates no light reach the photodetector

What is OCR? (3)

OCR Predicates electronic computers!

Project Tesseract
History of Tesseract
Open source OCR engine Developed by HP between 1985 and 1995 Never used in an HP product Rated highly at The Fourth Annual Test of OCR Accuracy in 1995 In 2005 HP transferred Tesseract to the ISRI and released it as open source
ISRI == Information Science Research Institute

The development is currently led by Google

Project Tesseract (2)

Tesseract is an OCR Engine and is NOT a complete OCR program
Originally intended to serve as a component part of other programs Works from the command line

Has no page layout analysis (will have soon)

Has no output formatting Has no GUI

Tesseract Versions
Stable build version 2.04
Has some documentation Can be easily trained on a new language Has memory leaks

Development version 3.0 (unstable)

Not documented, unstable Language files are not compatible (need special conversion)

Demo

Downloading, Compiling and Running Tesseract (Latest Version)

How Tesseract Works?

1. Adaptive thresholding on the input image
2. Analyze connected components in the binary image

3. Find text lines and words

4. First pass of recognition process
Attempts to recognize each word in turn

5. Satisfactory words are passed to adaptive trainer

6. Lessons learned are employed in a second pass
Used for words not satisfactory recognized

7. Producing the output text

Training Tesseract
1. Prepare training images and .box files
Files: lang.tif and lang.box 2.04 supports only uncompressed TIFFs .box files contain characters with coordinates

2. Extract the character features

tesseract lang.tif junk nobatch box.train

This produces lang.tr

3. Perform character clustering

mftraining lang.tr cntraining lang.tr

Training Tesseract (2)

4. Compute the character set properties
isLetter, isDigit, isUpper, isPunctuation,
unicharset_extractor lang.box

Unicode provides this information

5. Train language dictionaries

List of all words in the target language
List of the most frequent words

wordlist2dawg freq-words.txt lang.freq-dawg wordlist2dawg all-words.txt lang.word-dawg

Demo

Training Tesseract for Bulgarian and English

(Bulgarian for IT Professionals)

Other OCR Engines

OCRopus
Open source document analysis and OCR system Also funded by Google Provides much of the layout analysis functionality missing from Tesseract Capable to use engines other than Tesseract

http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/

Other OCR Engines (2)

ABBYY FineReader OCR
Supports a big number of features Known for its highly accuracy Commercial

Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI)

Supports editing documents scanned by Microsoft Office Document Scanning
It was firstly introduced in MS Office XP Commercial

Commercial OCR vs. Tesseract

100+ languages Accuracy is good now Sophisticated app with complex UI Works on complex magazine pages 6 languages Accuracy was good in 1995 No UI yet

Page layout analysis coming soon

Running on Linux, Mac, Windows, more.. Open source Free!

Windows mostly
Costs $130-$500

Tesseract Future
Page layout analysis
More languages Improve accuracy Add a UI Support for connected scripts (like Arabian)

Links
For more information see:
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_characte r_recognition http://tesseract-ocr.repairfaq.org/ downloads/tesseract_overview.pdf

Speakers
http://nakov.com/blog

http://veskokolev.blogspot.com

Tesseract OCR

Questions?