Embossed-Text-Reader

This is a tesseract based OCR to read Embossed text on metals. It can also be use as a general OCR.

This is not generalized solution. The satements and parameters of some funtions will changed according to the texture, color, lighting effect and visibility of text of image.

Tesseract is an open-sourced OCR which is capable of reading text from papers, pdfs and other clean formats. Tesseract fails when tried to perform OCR on noisy and dirty images (for eg. Embossed or Engraved text). The code uses opencv image filtering techniques to filter the images as clean as possible and then feeds it to Tesseract.

Dependencies

Python
OpenCV
Tesseract
Numpy
imutils

There are three files -

1. picture_from_webcam.py clicks a single picture from webcam and performs OCR on it
2. read_from_disk.py loads a picture from an image file
3. video_from_webcam.py feeds the realtime video from the webcam (doesn't perform as expected)

Example

Edged image (canny) with dialation

Finding and deleting unessesary contours

Inverted threshold image

Results

Sample results -

The code may fail sometimes but tuning parameters of canny and appropriate dialation will improve results

Data.zip contains all data I have used during implementation of this project