Custom Dictionary for Tesseract

Question

I am currently working on a project for android using Tesseract OCR. I was hoping to fine-tune the results given to the user by adding a dictionary. According to tesseract OCR wiki, the best way to go about this would be to

Replace tessdata/eng.user-words with your own word list, in the same format - UTF8 text, one word per line.

However there is no eng.user-words file in the tessdata folder, I assume that if I just make a text file with my dictionary in it, it will never be used...

Has anybody had a similar experience and knows what to do?

Answer 1

If you're using tesseract 3 (which I assume you are). You'll have to rebuild your eng.trainddata file.

I intended to replace the word-dawg file completely to try to get better results (ie - the words I'm detecting are always the same).

You'll need combine_tessdata and wordlist2dawg executables in the training directory when you compile tesseract.

1. unpack everything (i did this just to back up my eng.word-dawg, you'll also need the unicharset later)

   ./combine_tessdata -u eng.traineddata

2. create a textfile of your wordlist (wordlistfile)

3. create a eng.word-dawg

   ./wordlist2dawg wordlistfile eng.word-dawg traineddat_backup/.unicharset

4. replace the word-dawg file

   ./combine_tessdata -o eng.traineddata eng.word-dawg

that should be it.