Extracting text out of images

Question

I am working on extracting text out of images.

Initially images are colored with text placed in white, On further processing the images, the text is shown in black and other pixels are white (with some noise), here is a sample:

Now when I try OCR using pytesseract (tesseract) on it, I still am not getting any text.

Is any solution possible to extract text from colored images?

Convert color to grayscale and set a binary threshold so everything is either black or white. You can try a despeckle or such to remove the noise, but if `tesseract` from commandline can't pick it up then I would recommend `ocropy` from Google. — cuuupid, Sep 17 '17 at 05:32
Did you try getting help from [Adrian Rosebrock's blog](http://www.pyimagesearch.com/2017/07/10/using-tesseract-ocr-python/)? — Ébe Isaac, Sep 17 '17 at 07:12

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 20 '17 at 07:03

from PIL import Image
import pytesseract
import argparse
import cv2

# construct the argument parser and parse the arguments
ap = argparse.ArgumentParser()
ap.add_argument("-i", "--image", required=True, help="Path to the image")
args = vars(ap.parse_args())

# load the image and convert it to grayscale
image = cv2.imread(args["image"])
cv2.imshow("Original", image)

# Apply an "average" blur to the image

blurred = cv2.blur(image, (3,3))
cv2.imshow("Blurred_image", blurred)
img = Image.fromarray(blurred)
text = pytesseract.image_to_string(img, lang='eng')
print (text)
cv2.waitKey(0)

As as result i get = "Stay: in an Overwoter Bungalow $3»"

What about using Contour and taking unnecessary blobs from it ? might work

Thanks, I will give it a try, will post the results. – Yash Arora Sep 20 '17 at 13:57 — Yash Arora, Sep 20 '17 at 13:57

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 29 '20 at 10:54

Try this one -

import os
from PIL import Image
import cv2
import pytesseract
import ftfy
import uuid

filename = 'uTGi5.png'
image = cv2.imread(os.path.join(filename))
gray = cv2.threshold(image, 200, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)[1]
gray = cv2.resize(gray, (0, 0), fx=3, fy=3)
gray = cv2.medianBlur(gray, 9)
filename = str(uuid.uuid4())+".jpg"
cv2.imwrite(os.path.join(
    filename), gray)
config = ("-l eng --oem 3 --psm 11")
text = pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open(os.path.join(
    filename)), config=config)
text = ftfy.fix_text(text)
text = ftfy.fix_encoding(text)
text = text.replace('-\n', '')
print(text)

Extracting text out of images

2 Answers2