Text Localization, Detection and Recognition using Pytesseract

Pytesseract or Python-tesseract is an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool for Python. It will read and recognize the text in images, license plates etc. Python-tesseract is actually a wrapper class or a package for Google’s Tesseract-OCR Engine. It is also useful and regarded as a stand-alone invocation script to tesseract, as it can easily read all image types supported by the Pillow and Leptonica imaging libraries, which mainly includes – 

• jpg
• png
• gif
• bmp
• tiff etc

Also additionally, if it is used as a script, Python-tesseract will also print the recognized text instead of writing it to a file. Python-tesseract can be installed using pip as shown below –  

pip install pytesseract

If you are using Anaconda Cloud, Python-tesseract can be installed as shown below:-  

conda install -c conda-forge/label/cf202003 pytesseract

or  

conda install -c conda-forge pytesseract

Note: tesseract should be installed in the system before running the below script.
Below is the implementation. 

Python3

from pytesseract import*
import argparse
import cv2


# We construct the argument parser
# and parse the arguments
ap = argparse.ArgumentParser()

ap.add_argument("-i", "--image",
                required=True,
                help="path to input image to be OCR'd")
ap.add_argument("-c", "--min-conf",
                type=int, default=0,
                help="minimum confidence value to filter weak text detection")
args = vars(ap.parse_args())

# We load the input image and then convert
# it to RGB from BGR. We then use Tesseract
# to localize each area of text in the input
# image
images = cv2.imread(args["image"])
rgb = cv2.cvtColor(images, cv2.COLOR_BGR2RGB)
results = pytesseract.image_to_data(rgb, output_type=Output.DICT)

# Then loop over each of the individual text
# localizations
for i in range(0, len(results["text"])):

    # We can then extract the bounding box coordinates
    # of the text region from  the current result
    x = results["left"][i]
    y = results["top"][i]
    w = results["width"][i]
    h = results["height"][i]

    # We will also extract the OCR text itself along
    # with the confidence of the text localization
    text = results["text"][i]
    conf = int(results["conf"][i])

    # filter out weak confidence text localizations
    if conf > args["min_conf"]:

        # We will display the confidence and text to
        # our terminal
        print("Confidence: {}".format(conf))
        print("Text: {}".format(text))
        print("")

        # We then strip out non-ASCII text so we can
        # draw the text on the image We will be using
        # OpenCV, then draw a bounding box around the
        # text along with the text itself
        text = "".join(text).strip()
        cv2.rectangle(images,
                      (x, y),
                      (x + w, y + h),
                      (0, 0, 255), 2)
        cv2.putText(images,
                    text,
                    (x, y - 10),
                    cv2.FONT_HERSHEY_SIMPLEX,
                    1.2, (0, 255, 255), 3)

# After all, we will show the output image
cv2.imshow("Image", images)
cv2.waitKey(0)

Output: 
Execute the command below to view the Output 

python ocr.py --image ocr.png 

In addition to Output, we will see the Confidence Level and the Text In Command Prompt as shown below – 

Confidence: 93
Text: I

Confidence: 93
Text: LOVE

Confidence: 91
Text: TESSERACT