Training Tesseract 3 to recognize numbers from real images of gas meters

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I'm trying to train tesseract to recognize numbers from real images of gas meters.

The images that I use for training are made with a camera, for this reason there are many problems: poor images resolution, blurred images, poor lighting or low contrast as a result of the overexposure, reflections, shadows, etc...

For training, I have created a large image with a series of digits captured by the images of the gas meter and I manually edited the file box to create the .tr files. The result is that only the digits of the clearer and sharper images are recognized while the digits of blurred images are not captured by tesseract.

4 Answers

As far as I can tell you need to OpenCV to recognize box in which numbers are located, but OpenCV is not god for OCR. After you locate box, just crop that part, do image processing and then hand it over to tesseract for OCR.

I need help with OpenCV because I don't know how to program in OpenCV.

Here are few real world examples.

  • First image is original image (croped power meter numbers)
  • Second image is slightly cleaned up image in GIMP, around 50% OCR accuracy in tesseract
  • Third image is completely cleaned image - 100% OCR recognized without any training!

first image second image third image

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