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Tesseract OCR Engine

Tesseract OCR Engine. Svetlin Nakov and Veselin Kolev. BASD (Bulgarian Association of Software Developers). www.devbg.org. Hot News!. Microsoft Corporation just announced its strategic partnership with OpenFest OpenFest is upgrading to Windows 7 and MS SQL Server 2008. =. +. What is OCR?.

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Tesseract OCR Engine

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  1. Tesseract OCR Engine Svetlin Nakov and Veselin Kolev BASD (Bulgarian Association of Software Developers) www.devbg.org

  2. Hot News! • Microsoft Corporation just announced its strategic partnership with OpenFest • OpenFest is upgrading to Windows 7 and MS SQL Server 2008 = +

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

  4. What is OCR? (2) • Invented by Gustav Tauschek • Tauschek obtained a patent on OCR • 1929 in Germany • 1935 in USA • Tauschek’s machine • Was a mechanical device • Uses templates, light and photodetector • When a light was directed towards the templates no light reach the photodetector

  5. What is OCR? (3) • OCR Predicates electronic computers!

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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)

  9. Demo Downloading, Compiling and Running Tesseract (Latest Version)

  10. How Tesseract Works? • Adaptive thresholding on the input image • Analyze connected components in the binary image • Find text lines and words • First pass of recognition process • Attempts to recognize each word in turn • Satisfactory words are passed to adaptive trainer • Lessons learned are employed in a second pass • Used for words not satisfactory recognized • Producing the output text

  11. Training Tesseract • Prepare training images and .box files • Files: lang.tif and lang.box • 2.04 supports only uncompressed TIFFs • .box files contain characters with coordinates • Extract the character features • This produces lang.tr • Perform character clustering tesseract lang.tif junk nobatch box.train mftraining lang.tr cntraining lang.tr

  12. Training Tesseract (2) • Compute the character set properties • isLetter, isDigit, isUpper, isPunctuation, … • Unicode provides this information • Train language dictionaries • List of all words in the target language • List of the most frequent words unicharset_extractor lang.box wordlist2dawg freq-words.txt lang.freq-dawg wordlist2dawg all-words.txt lang.word-dawg

  13. Demo Training Tesseract for Bulgarian and English (Bulgarian for IT Professionals)

  14. 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/

  15. 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

  16. Commercial OCR vs. Tesseract • 100+ languages • Accuracy is good now • Sophisticated app with complex UI • Works on complex magazine pages • Windows mostly • Costs $130-$500 • 6 languages • Accuracy was good in 1995 • No UI yet • Page layout analysis coming soon • Running on Linux, Mac, Windows, more.. • Open source – Free!

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

  18. Links • For more information see: • http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition • http://tesseract-ocr.repairfaq.org/downloads/tesseract_overview.pdf • Speakers • http://nakov.com/blog • http://veskokolev.blogspot.com

  19. Tesseract OCR Questions?

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