Tesseract macOS
This is an open-source macOS-based Objective-C wrapper for the OCR library Tesseract.
As far as I know, mine is the only working version ported to macOS.
Star this repo if you find it helpful, fork this repo if you want to experiment with it. :)
Demo Application
For those of you who wish to first test out the OCR capabilities, I have created a demo application that lets you do just this.
First build the Xcode project included in this repository. This will generate an application through wish you can take a screenshot, as shown in the following gif.
In the Xcode log you will find the corresponding text Tesseract detected for this screenshot.
Getting Started
Getting this to work in your own project
-
Clone this project
-
Copy over the
include
,lib
, andtessdata
folders to your project. -
Add these folders to your project in Xcode. Make sure
include
andlib
are added as groups andtessdata
is added as a folder reference.The location of this setting is shown in the following image:
-
Copy over the files
SLTesseract.mm
andSLTesseract.h
to your code directory. -
Verify that the file
SLTesseract.mm
is added toTargets > Build Phases > Compile Sources
. Additionally, verify that all the static libraries are also added toTargets > Build Phases > Link Binary With Libraries
. (This process should be done automatically) -
You are now ready to use Tesseract in your macOS project. (See Example Usage for code syntax)
Dependencies
None so far.
Example Usage
At the top of the file include the header file
#import "SLTesseract.h"
And then
SLTesseract *ocr = [[SLTesseract alloc] init];
will initiallize the class SLTesseract.
(optional) ocr.language = @"eng";
(optional) ocr.charWhitelist = @"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
(optional) ocr.charBlacklist = @"1234567890"
Finally, assuming you already have the image that you wish to perform OCR on in NSImage form, you can call
NSString *text = [ocr recognize:image];
to recognize the image in question and get the corresponding text.
Libraries Used
- Tesseract (v3.05.01)
- Leptonica (v1.75.3)
- LibPNG (v1.6.34)
- LibTIFF (v4.0.9)
- LibJPEG (v9c)
- LibZ (v1.2.11)
License
My project Tesseract macOS itself is distributed under the MIT license (see LICENSE);
Keep in mind that the main dependency Tesseract is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Contact
You may reach me at Tesseract-macOS@scott-liu.com
to inquire about this project.