How to extract Unicode character from .png file?

Question

I want to extract Unicode character from .jpg and .png files.

I try to do it by using following command:

tesseract 1.png output.txt

That command works for English characters but when I try it for Unicode like Hindi, Marathi, or Devanagari Script it produces the wrong output.

Is there any option to extract Unicode (Devanagari) script to text file by using OCR?

Answer 1

Is there any option to extract Unicode script?

When I try it for Unicode like Hindi, Marathi, or Devanagari Script it produces the wrong output.

It appears that only Hindi is supported out of the box.

You need use to use the -l langoption:

tesseract 1.png output.txt -l hin

You can train tesseract to recognise other languages like Marathi, or Devanagari.

See How to use the tools provided to train Tesseract 3.0x for a new language

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TESSERACT(1) Manual Page

OPTIONS

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-l lang

The language to use. If none is specified, English is assumed. Multiple languages may be specified, separated by plus characters. Tesseract uses 3-character ISO 639-2 language codes. (See LANGUAGES)

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LANGUAGES

There are currently language packs available for the following languages:

ara (Arabic), aze (Azerbauijani), bul (Bulgarian), cat (Catalan), ces (Czech), chi_sim (Simplified Chinese), chi_tra (Traditional Chinese), chr (Cherokee), dan (Danish), dan-frak (Danish (Fraktur)), deu (German), ell (Greek), eng (English), enm (Old English), epo (Esperanto), est (Estonian), fin (Finnish), fra (French), frm (Old French), glg (Galician), heb (Hebrew), hin (Hindi), hrv (Croation), hun (Hungarian), ind (Indonesian), ita (Italian), jpn (Japanese), kor (Korean), lav (Latvian), lit (Lithuanian), nld (Dutch), nor (Norwegian), pol (Polish), por (Portuguese), ron (Romanian), rus (Russian), slk (Slovakian), slv (Slovenian), sqi (Albanian), spa (Spanish), srp (Serbian), swe (Swedish), tam (Tamil), tel (Telugu), tgl (Tagalog), tha (Thai), tur (Turkish), ukr (Ukrainian), vie (Vietnamese)

To use a non-standard language pack named foo.traineddata, set the TESSDATA_PREFIX environment variable so the file can be found at TESSDATA_PREFIX/tessdata/foo.traineddata and give Tesseract the argument -l foo.

Source TESSERACT(1) Manual Page