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
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Implement the Google AJAX Search API

    Let's be honest...WordPress' search functionality isn't great. Let's be more honest...no search functionality is better than Google's. Luckily for us, Google provides an awesome method by which we can use their search for our own site: the Google AJAX Search API.

  • By
    Create a Context Menu with Dojo and Dijit

    Context menus, used in the right type of web application, can be invaluable.  They provide shortcut methods to different functionality within the application and, with just a right click, they are readily available.  Dojo's Dijit frameworks provides an easy way to create stylish, flexible context...

Discussion

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