Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

How to Detect Text in Images

By  on  

Images are a great way to communicate without text but oftentimes images are used/abused to spread text within social media and advertisements. Text in images also presents an accessibility issue. The truth is that it's important, for any number of reasons, to be able to detect text in image files. The amazing open source tool that makes detecting text in images possible is tesseract OCR!

I recommend using Homebrew to install tesseract:

brew install tesseract

To run tesseract to read text from an image, you can run the following from command line:

tesseract ~/Downloads/MyImage.png ~/Downloads/MyImage.txt -l eng

The command above extracts detected text in the English language (-l eng) into a text file (MyImage.txt). The process is very quick and there are dozens of supported languages.

Let's look at the following example:

The following text is detected:

International
‘Champions
Cup

~- TOUR SQUAD

#AFCTour2018

CECH MUSTAFI GUENDOUZI oziL
LENO SOKRATIS NELSON IWOBI
MARTINEZ MAVROPANOS SMITHROWE = NKETIAH
BELLERIN OSEI-TUTU WILLOCK PEREZ
KOLASINAC ELNENY RAMSEY LACAZETTE
CHAMBERS MAITLAND-NILES MKHITARYAN AUBAMEYANG
HOLDING

There are a number of utilities in different programming languages that plug into tesseract's functionality, but it's important to know the underlying tool! tesseract is an unbelievable tool that you should take advantage of if you need an open source utility for detecting text in an image!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    New MooTools Plugin: ElementFilter

    My new MooTools plugin, ElementFilter, provides a great way for you to allow users to search through the text of any mix of elements. Simply provide a text input box and ElementFilter does the rest of the work. The XHTML I've used a list for this example...

  • By
    Use Elements as Background Images with -moz-element

    We all know that each browser vendor takes the liberty of implementing their own CSS and JavaScript features, and I'm thankful for that. Mozilla and WebKit have come out with some interesting proprietary CSS properties, and since we all know that cementing standards...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!