image-to-text

CLI python application that extracts the text within an image to a .txt file. The image must have some text in it for this app to work.

The application receives the path to the image wanted to extract the text, and generates a .txt file containing the correspondent text.

This project is intended to see the potential of AI, specifically digital image processing.

Getting Started

1. Installation process

In order to have character recognition capabilities in this application, it is necessary to install pytesseract Optical Character Recognition library.

pip install pytesseract

The library (if used on Windows OS) requires the tesseract.exe binary to be also present for proper installation of the library. During the installation of the aforementioned executable, we would be prompted to specify a path for it. This path needs to be remembered as it would be utilized later on in the code. For most installations the path would be C:\Program Files (x86)\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe

2. Running the application

The application is run by executing the following command in the terminal, positioned in /src folder:

Linux

    python3 Converter.py

Windows

    python Converter.py

The application will prompt the user to enter the path to the image file. The path can be entered as follows:

1. Entering the path to the image file directly

Example:

    Type the path to the image file: C:\Users\Gianluca\Desktop\test.jpg

2. Entering the path to the image file by dragging and dropping the file into the terminal

Example:

    Type the path to the image file: c:\Users\Gianluca\Desktop\test.jpg

3. Output

The application will generate a .txt file containing the text extracted from the image. The file will be saved in the same directory as the image file and the path will be prompted in the terminal.

Tests

The application was tested with the following image:

The output of the application was the following:

Home

Stefan Weil edited this page on Jul 13 - 79 revisions

Tesseract at UB Mannheim

The Mannheim University Library (UB Mannheim) uses Tesseract to perform text recognition (OCR = optical character recognition) for historical German newspapers (Allgemeine PreuBische Staatszeitung, Deutscher Reichsanzeiger). The latest results with text from more than 700000 pages are available online.

Tesseract installer for Windows

Normally we run Tesseract on Debian GNU Linux, but there was also the need for a Windows version. That's why we have built a Tesseract installer for Windows.

WARNING: Tesseract should be either installed in the directory which is suggested during the installation or in a new directory. The uninstaller removes the whole installation directory. If you installed Tesseract in an existing directory, that directory will be removed with all its subdirectories and files.

The latest installers can be downloaded here:

� tesseract-ocr-w32-setup-v5.2.0.202207 12.exe (32 bit) and � tesseract-ocr-w64-setup-v5.2.0.20220712.exe (64 bit) resp.

There are also older versions available.

In addition, we also provide documentation which was generated by Doxygen.

Built With

• Python
• Tesseract 5.1.0

Authors

• Gianluca Gibellato
• Marcelo Caracas