Is there an OCR library that outputs coordinates of words found within an image? [closed]

Question

In my experience, OCR libraries tend to merely output the text found within an image but not where the text was found. Is there an OCR library that outputs both the words found within an image as well as the coordinates (x, y, width, height) where those words were found?

Answer 1

Most commercial OCR engines will return word and character coordinate positions but you have to work with their SDK's to extract the information. Even Tesseract OCR will return position information but it has been not easy to get to. Version 3.01 will make easier but a DLL interface is still being worked on.

Unfortunately, most free OCR programs use Tesseract OCR in its basic form and they only report the raw ASCII results.

www.transym.com - Transym OCR - outputs coordinates. www.rerecognition.com - KADMOS engine returns coordinates.

Also Caere Omnipage, Mitek, Abbyy, Charactell return character positions.

Answer 2

I'm using TessNet (a Tesseract C# wrapper) and I'm getting word coordinates with the following code:

TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(@"U:\user files\bwalker\ocrTesting.txt"); Bitmap image = new Bitmap(@"u:\user files\bwalker\2849257.tif"); tessnet2.Tesseract ocr = new tessnet2.Tesseract(); // If digit only ocr.SetVariable("tessedit_char_whitelist", "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.,$-/#&=()\"':?"); // To use correct tessdata ocr.Init(@"C:\Users\bwalker\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\tessnetWinForms\tessnetWinForms\bin\Release\", "eng", false);  List<tessnet2.Word> result = ocr.DoOCR(image, System.Drawing.Rectangle.Empty); string Results = ""; foreach (tessnet2.Word word in result) {     Results += word.Confidence + ", " + word.Text + ", " +word.Top+", "+word.Bottom+", "+word.Left+", "+word.Right+"\n"; } using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(@"U:\user files\bwalker\ocrTesting2.txt", true)) {     writer.WriteLine(Results);//+", "+word.Top+", "+word.Bottom+", "+word.Left+", "+word.Right);     writer.Close(); } MessageBox.Show("Completed");