Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine was originally developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories Bristol and at Hewlett Packard Co, Greeley Colorado between 1985 and 1994.
The Tesseract OCR engine was one of the top 3 engines in the 1995 UNLV Accuracy test. Between 1995 and 2006 it had little development done on it, but it is probably one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available.
Please note that this software has no page layout analysis, no output formatting, and no graphical user interface.
Tesseract runs from the command line. It can only process an image of a single column and create text from it. It can detect fixed pitch vs proportional text. Tesseract handles image files in TIFF format (with filename extension .tif); other file formats need to be be converted to TIFF before being submitted to Tesseract.
Key Features
- Suitable for use as a backend, and can be used for more complicated OCR tasks including layout analysis by using a frontend such as OCRopus.
- Scripts to test accuracy against the original 1995 tests run by UNLV.
- Ability to train in other languages and scripts.
- Support for English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch.
Website: github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
Support: Mailing List
Developer: Oliver Rauch
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Tesseract is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| OCR Systems | |
|---|---|
| Tesseract | High quality neural net (LSTM) based OCR engine focused on line recognition |
| EasyOCR | OCR that reads natural scene text and dense text in documents |
| ocrs | Modern OCR engine |
| Surya | Multilingual document OCR toolkit with text recognition |
| ocropy | Open source document analysis and OCR system |
| Ocrad | OCR engine based on a feature extraction method |
| Cuneiform | OCR Engine to convert OCR documents into editable form |
| GOCR | Reads images in many formats |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| OCR Tools | |
|---|---|
| OCRmyPDF | Adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDFs using the unpaper utility |
| Paperwork | Simplify the management of your paperwork |
| OCRFeeder | Desktop OCR suite featuring a complete GTK graphical user interface |
| ocropy | Open source document analysis and OCR system |
| gImageReader | Simple Gtk/Qt front-end to Tesseract |
| gscan2pdf | GUI to produce PDFs or DjVus from scanned documents |
| lios | linux-intelligent-ocr-solution for converting print into text |
| hocr-tools | Manipulate and evaluate hOCR format |
| Skanpage | Simple scanning application optimized for multi-page document scanning |
| GOCR | Reads images in many formats |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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