Welcome to PILtesseract’s documentation!¶

Table of Contents:

The piltesseract package is a simple Tesseract-OCR command line wrapper.

piltesseract allows quick conversion of PIL Image.Image instances to text using Tesseract-OCR.

Warning

piltesseract is intended to only work with tesseract 3.03+, one awesome feature added in 3.03 is the ability to pipe images via stdin, piltesseract utilizes this feature.

Examples

>>> from PIL import Image
>>> from piltesseract import get_text_from_image
>>> image = Image.open('quickfox.png')
>>> get_text_from_image(image)
'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'

Without a config file, you can set config variables using optional keywords.

>>> text = get_text_from_image(
        image,
        tessedit_ocr_engine_mode=1,  # cube mode enum found in Tesseract-OCR docs
        cube_debug_level=1
        )

piltesseract.get_text_from_image(image, tesseract_dir_path=u'', stderr=None, psm=3, lang=u'eng', tessdata_dir_path=None, user_words_path=None, user_patterns_path=None, config_name=None, **config_variables)¶

Uses tesseract to get text from an image.

Outside of image, tesseract_dir_path, and stderr, the arguments mirror the official command line’s usage. A list of the command line options can be found here: https://tesseract-ocr.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/tesseract.1.html

Parameters:	image (Image.Image or str) – The image to find text from or a path to that image. tesseract_dir_path (Optional[str]) – The path to the directory with the tesseract binary. Defaults to “”, which works if the binary is on the environmental PATH variable. stderr (Optional[file]) – The file like object (implements write) the tesseract stderr stream will write to. Defaults to None. You can set it to sys.stdin to see all output easily. psm (Optional[int]) – Page Segmentation Mode. Limits Tesseracts layout analysis (see the Tesseract docs). Default is 3, full analysis. lang (Optional[str]) – The language to use. Default is ‘eng’ for English. tessdata_dir_path (Optional[str]) – The path to the tessdata directory. user_words_path (Optional[str]) – The path to user words file. user_patterns_path (Optional[str]) – The path to the user patterns file. config_name (Optional[str]) – The name of a config file. **config_variables – The config variables for tesseract. A list of config variables can be found here: http://www.sk-spell.sk.cx/tesseract-ocr-parameters-in-302-version
Returns:	The parsed text.
Return type:	str
Raises:	`subprocess.CalledProcessError` – If the tesseract exit status is not a success.

Examples

Examples assume “image” is a picture of the text “ABC123”. See piltesseract tests for working code.

>>> get_text_from_image(image)
'ABC123'
>>> get_text_from_image(image, psm=10)  #single character psm
'A'

You can use tesseract’s default configs or your own:

>>> get_text_from_image(image, config_name='digits')
'13123'

Without a config file, you can set config variables using optional keywords:

>>> text = get_text_from_image(
        image,
        tessedit_char_whitelist='1'
        tessedit_ocr_engine_mode=1,  #cube mode enum found in Tesseract-OCR docs
        )
'1  11 '

Welcome to PILtesseract’s documentation!¶

Indices and tables¶