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 ( http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ ). 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
 > print(pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('test.png')))
 > print(pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('test-european.jpg'), lang='fra'))

INSTALLATION:

Prerequisites:

• Python-tesseract requires python 2.5 or later or python 3.
• You will need the Python Imaging Library (PIL). Under Debian/Ubuntu, this is the package "python-imaging" or "python3-imaging" for python3.
• Install google tesseract-ocr from http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ . 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".

Installing via pip:
See the pytesseract package page

$> sudo pip install pytesseract   

Installing from source:

$> git clone [email protected]:madmaze/pytesseract.git   
$> sudo python setup.py install  

LICENSE: Python-tesseract is released under the GPL v3.

CONTRIBUTERS:

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