Using Tesseract 4 with C#

Recently I built a small tool to read the text of thousands of images.

Introduction

A common technique to extract text from images is know as OCR (Optical character recognition) and the best implementation, that I Know, is called Tesseract.

When a I started to build the tool, I used the most famous Tesseract’s wrapper for .NET.

Although the wrapper worked very well, I was curious about if there was a way to get better peformance results. With a little search I noticed that the .NET wrapper still use Tesseract 3, but there was a version 4 available with a lot of performance improvements:

If you are running Tesseract 4, you can use the “fast” integer models.

Tesseract 4 also uses up to four CPU threads while processing a page, so it will be faster than Tesseract 3

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/FAQ#can-i-increase-speed-of-ocr


So, I decided to try Tesseract 4 to see how could it impact in the performance of my tool. As at the time there was no .NET wrapper for it, I removed the old wrapper and called Tesseract 4 directly as a process.

The use of Tesseract 4 cut off the time to read the images in almost half

TesseractService

I ended up developing the class below to call the Tesseract 4 command-line (tesseract.exe) directly from the C# code.

Setup

Usage

If you try to read a image like this one:

post image


You will get this result after call the TesseractService.GetText method: The (quick) [brown] {fox} jumps! Over the $43,456.78 <lazy> #90 dog & duck/goose, as 12.5% of E-mail from [email protected] is spam. Der ,.schnelle" braune Fuchs springt iiber den faulen Hund. Le renard brun «rapide» saute par-dessus le chien paresseux. La volpe marrone rapida salta sopra il cane pigro. El zorro marron rapido salta sobre el perro perezoso. A raposa marrom rapida salta sobre o céo preguicoso.

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