ruby-tesseract - Ruby bindings and wrapper

This wrapper binds the TessBaseAPI object through ffi-inline (which means it will work on JRuby too) and then proceeds to wrap said API in a more ruby-esque Engine class.

Making it work

To make this library work you need tesseract-ocr and leptonica libraries and headers and a C++ compiler.

The gem is called tesseract-ocr.

Examples

Following are some examples that show the functionalities provided by tesseract-ocr.

Basic functionality of tesseract

require 'tesseract'

e = Tesseract::Engine.new {|e|
  e.language  = :eng
  e.blacklist = '|'
}

e.text_for('test/first.png').strip # => 'ABC'

You can pass to #text_for either a path, an IO object, a string containing the image or an object that responds to #to_blob (for example Magick::Image), keep in mind that the format has to be supported by leptonica.

Accessing advanced features

With advanced features you get access to blocks, paragraphs, lines, words and symbols.

There are lot of way to access those levels, the methods are the following (replace level with one of the accessible features, so each_level can be each_block or each_paragraph etc.)

The following kind of accessors need a block to be passed and they pass to the block each Element object. The Element object has various getters to access certain features, I'll talk about them later.

The methods are:

each_level
each_level_for
each_level_at

The following accessors instead return an Array of Elements with cached getters, the getters are cached beacause the values accessible in the Element are linked to the state of the internal API, and that state changes if you access something else.

The methods are:

levels
levels_for
levels_at

Again, to *_for methods you can pass what you can pass to a #text_for.

Each Element object has the following getters:

bounding_box, this will return the box where the element is confined into
binary_image, this will return the bichromatic image of the element
image, this will return the image of the element
baseline, this will return the line where the text is with a pair of coordinates
orientation, this will return the orientation of the element
text, this will return the text of the element
confidence, this will return the confidence of correctness for the element

Block elements also have type accessors that specify the type of the block.

Word elements also have font_attributes, from_dictionary? and numeric? getters.

Symbol elements also have superscript?, subscript? and dropcap? getters.

Using the binary

You can also use the shipped executable in the following way: