How do I choose between Tesseract and OpenCV?

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I recently came across Tesseract and OpenCV. It looks like Tesseract is a full-fledged OCR engine and OpenCV can be used as a framework to create an OCR application/service.

I tried using Tesseract on some of my images and its accuracy seems decent. Later, I came across a very simple tutorial on using OpenCV to perform OCR using Python and was impressed. In a few minutes, I finished training the system and its accuracy was good. But of course, taking this approach means I need to train my system extensively using a large training set.

My specific questions are the following:

  • How does one choose between Tesseract and using OpenCV to build a custom OCR app?
  • There are training datasets available for Tesseract for different languages. Does OpenCV have something similar so that I don't have to start ground up to achieve OCR?
  • Which one is better for a wanna-be commercial application?

Any suggestions?

tesseract computer-vision opencv ocr python
4 Answers

OpenCV is a library for CV, used to analyze and process images in general. Tesseract is a library for OCR, which is a specialized subset of CV that's dedicated to extracting text from images.

From OpenCV.org

.....used to detect and recognize faces, identify objects, classify human actions in videos, track camera movements, track moving objects, extract 3D models of objects, produce 3D point clouds from stereo cameras, stitch images together to produce a high resolution image of an entire scene, find similar images from an image database, remove red eyes from images taken using flash, follow eye movements, recognize scenery and establish markers to overlay it with augmented reality, etc

From Tesseract Github:

.....can be used directly, or (for programmers) using an API to extract typed, handwritten or printed text from images. It supports a wide variety of languages.

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