Python | Using PIL ImageGrab and PyTesseract

ImageGrab and PyTesseract

ImageGrab is a Python module that helps to capture the contents of the screen. PyTesseract is an Optical Character Recognition(OCR) tool for Python. Together they can be used to read the contents of a section of the screen.

Installation –

Pillow (a newer version of PIL)

pip install Pillow

PyTesseract

pip install pytesseract

Apart from this, a tesseract executable needs to be installed.

Implementation of code

The following functions were primarily used in the code –

pytesseract.image_to_string(image, lang=**language**) – Takes the image and searches for words of the language in their text.

cv2.cvtColor(image, **colour conversion**) – Used to make the image monochrome(using cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY).

ImageGrab.grab(bbox=**Coordinates of the area of the screen to be captured**) – Used to repeatedly(using a loop) capture a specific part of the screen.

The objectives of the code are:

1. To use a loop to repeatedly capture a part of the screen.
2. To convert the captured image into grayscale.
3. Use PyTesseract to read the text in it.

Code : Python code to use ImageGrab and PyTesseract

# cv2.cvtColor takes a numpy ndarray as an argument
import numpy as nm

import pytesseract

# importing OpenCV
import cv2

from PIL import ImageGrab


def imToString():

    # Path of tesseract executable
    pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd ='**Path to tesseract executable**'
    while(True):

        # ImageGrab-To capture the screen image in a loop.
        # Bbox used to capture a specific area.
        cap = ImageGrab.grab(bbox =(700, 300, 1400, 900))

        # Converted the image to monochrome for it to be easily
        # read by the OCR and obtained the output String.
        tesstr = pytesseract.image_to_string(
                cv2.cvtColor(nm.array(cap), cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY),
                lang ='eng')
        print(tesstr)

# Calling the function
imToString()

Output

The above code can be used to capture a certain section of the screen and read the text contents of it.

Read about other libraries used in the code

Numpy
OpenCV(cv2)