Optical Character Recognition by Open source OCR Tool Tesseract: A Case Study

Abstract

Optical character recognition (OCR) method has been used in converting printed text into editable text. OCR is very useful and popular method in various applications. Accuracy of OCR can be dependent on text preprocessing and segmentation algorithms. Sometimes it is difficult to retrieve text from the image because of different size, style, orientation, complex background of image etc. We begin this paper with an introduction of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) method, History of Open Source OCR tool Tesseract, architecture of it and experiment result of OCR performed by Tesseract on different kinds images are discussed. We conclude this paper by comparative study of this tool with other commercial OCR tool Transym OCR by considering vehicle number plate as input. From vehicle number plate we tried to extract vehicle number by using Tesseract and Transym and compared these tools based on various parameters.