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:

To use a loop to repeatedly capture a part of the screen.
To convert the captured image into grayscale.
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()