tesseract-ocrHow can I use tesseract OCR to detect text from an empty page?

Tesseract OCR is a popular open source library for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). It can be used to detect text from an empty page by first pre-processing the image and then using the tesseract API to recognize the text.

Example code to detect text from an empty page using tesseract OCR:

# import the necessary packages
import cv2
import pytesseract

# read the image
image = cv2.imread('empty_page.png')

# pre-process the image by converting it to grayscale
gray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)

# apply Otsu's thresholding method to binarize the image
thresh = cv2.threshold(gray, 0, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV | cv2.THRESH_OTSU)[1]

# apply tesseract OCR to detect the text
text = pytesseract.image_to_string(thresh)

# print the detected text
print(text)

Output example

No text detected

Code explanation

1. import cv2 and import pytesseract: These imports are necessary for using the OpenCV and pytesseract libraries.

2. image = cv2.imread('empty_page.png'): This line reads in the image of the empty page.

3. gray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY): This line converts the image to grayscale.

4. thresh = cv2.threshold(gray, 0, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV | cv2.THRESH_OTSU)[1]: This line applies Otsu's thresholding method to binarize the image.

5. text = pytesseract.image_to_string(thresh): This line applies tesseract OCR to detect the text.

6. print(text): This line prints the detected text.

Helpful links

1. Tesseract OCR Documentation

2. OpenCV Documentation

3. Pytesseract Documentation

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