Page layout analysis using Tesseract?

Question

Tesseract 3 is able to perform page layout analysis. However, I couldn't find any sample code or documentation on how to use the library for such purposes. I hope someone here can explain how to perform layout analysis on an image and how to parse the resulting data.

Answer 1

There is an option since 3.04:

tesseract -c preserve_interword_spaces=1 test.tif test

Here is a reference to what looks like the related development thread.

Answer 2

Tesseract can be given a page mode parameter (-psm) which can have the following values:

• 0 = Orientation and script detection (OSD) only.
• 1 = Automatic page segmentation with OSD.
• 2 = Automatic page segmentation, but no OSD, or OCR
• 3 = Fully automatic page segmentation, but no OSD. (Default)
• 4 = Assume a single column of text of variable sizes.
• 5 = Assume a single uniform block of vertically aligned text.
• 6 = Assume a single uniform block of text.
• 7 = Treat the image as a single text line.
• 8 = Treat the image as a single word.
• 9 = Treat the image as a single word in a circle.
• 10 = Treat the image as a single character.

Example:

tesseract image.tif image.txt -l eng -psm 0

However, I am not sure that it is possible to use the layout analysis in standalone mode.