Using the Tesseract OCR library

While Tesseract OCR is already integrated with OpenCV 3.0, it's still worth studying its API since it allows for finer grained control over Tesseract parameters. This integration will be studied in Chapter 11, Text Recognition with Tesseract.

Creating an OCR function

We'll change the previous example to work with Tesseract. Start by adding tesseract/baseapi.h and fstream to the include list:

#include opencv2/opencv.hpp; 
#include tesseract/baseapi.h; 
 
#include vector; 
#include fstream; 

Then, we'll create a global TessBaseAPI object that represents our Tesseract OCR engine:

tesseract::TessBaseAPI ocr; 

The ocr engine is completely self-contained. If you want to create a multi...