PyTesseract: Simple Python Optical Character Recognition
Introduction
Humans can understand the contents of an image simply by looking. We perceive the text on the image as text and can read it.
Computers don’t work the same way. They need something more concrete, organized in a way they can understand.
This is where Optical Character Recognition (OCR) kicks in. Whether it’s recognition of car plates from a camera, or hand-written documents that should be converted into a digital copy, this technique is very useful. While it’s not always perfect, it’s very convenient and makes it a lot easier and faster for some people to do their jobs.
In this article, we will delve into the depth of Optical Character Recognition and its application areas. We will also build a simple script in Python that will help us detect characters from images and expose this through a Flask application for a more convenient interaction medium.
What is Optical Character Recognition?
Optical Character Recognition involves the detection of text content on images and translation of the images to encoded text that the computer can easily understand. An image containing text is scanned and analyzed in order to identify the characters in it. Upon identification, the character