Chapter 11. Text Recognition with Tesseract
In the previous chapter, we covered the very basic OCR processing functions. Although they are quite useful for scanned or photographed documents, they are almost useless when dealing with text that casually appears in a picture.
In this chapter, we'll explore the OpenCV 3.0 text module, which deals specifically with scene text detection. Using this API, it is possible to detect text that appears in a webcam video, or to analyze photographed images (like the ones in Street View or taken by a surveillance camera) to extract text information in real time. This allows a wide range of applications to be created, from accessibility to marketing and even robotics fields.
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
- Understand what is scene text recognition
- Understand how the text API works
- Use the OpenCV 3.0 text API to detect text
- Extract the detected text to an image
- Use the text API and Tesseract integration to identify letters
