Building Computer Vision Projects with OpenCV 4 and C++

Text Recognition with Tesseract

In Chapter 10, Developing Segmentation Algorithms for Text Recognition, 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 4.0 text module, which deals specifically with scene text detection. Using this API, it is possible to detect the 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 for a wide range of applications to be created, from accessibility, to marketing, and even robotics ...