Tesseract OCR for PHP

A wrapper to work with Tesseract OCR inside PHP.

Installation

First of all, make sure you have Tesseract OCR installed. (v3.03 or greater)

As a Composer dependency

{
    "require": {
        "thiagoalessio/tesseract_ocr": "1.2.0"
    }
}

Usage

Basic usage

Given the following image:

And the following code:

echo (new TesseractOCR('text.png'))
    ->run();

Produces:

The quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy
dog.

Other languages

Given the following image:

And the following code:

echo (new TesseractOCR('german.png'))
    ->run();

Produces griifien.

Which is not good, but defining a language:

echo (new TesseractOCR('german.png'))
    ->lang('deu')
    ->run();

Produces grüßen.

Multiple languages

Given the following image:

And the following code:

echo (new TesseractOCR('multi-languages.png'))
    ->lang('eng', 'jpn', 'por')
    ->run();

Produces I eat 寿司 de maçã.

Inducing recognition

Given the following image:

And the following code:

echo (new TesseractOCR('8055.png'))
    ->whitelist(range('A', 'Z'))
    ->run();

Produces BOSS.

Breaking CAPTCHAs

Yes, I know some of you might want to use this library for the noble purpose of breaking CAPTCHAs, so please take a look on this comment:

thiagoalessio#91 (comment)

API

executable

Define a custom location of the tesseract executable, if by any reason it is not present in the $PATH.

echo (new TesseractOCR('img.png'))
    ->executable('/path/to/tesseract')
    ->run();

path

Specify a custom location for the tessdata directory.

echo (new TesseractOCR('img.png'))
    ->tessdataDir('/path')
    ->run();

userWords

Specify the location of user words file.

This is a plain text file containing a list of words that you want to be considered as a normal dictionary words by tesseract.

Useful when dealing with contents that contain technical terminology, jargon, etc.

$ cat /path/to/user-words.txt
foo
bar

echo (new TesseractOCR('img.png'))
    ->userWords('/path/to/user-words.txt')
    ->run();

userPatterns

Specify the location of user patterns file.

If the contents you are dealing with have known patterns, this option can help a lot tesseract's recognition accuracy.

$ cat /path/to/user-patterns.txt'
1-\d\d\d-GOOG-441
www.\n\\\*.com

echo (new TesseractOCR('img.png'))
    ->userPatterns('/path/to/user-patterns.txt')
    ->run();

lang

Define one or more languages to be used during the recognition. A complete list of available languages can be found here.

Tip from @daijiale: Use the combination ->lang('chi_sim', 'chi_tra') for proper recognition of Chinese.

 echo (new TesseractOCR('img.png'))
     ->lang('lang1', 'lang2', 'lang3')
     ->run();

psm

Specify the Page Segmentation Mode, which instructs tesseract how to interpret the given image.

Possible psm values are:

Value	Description
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.

echo (new TesseractOCR('img.png'))
    ->psm(6)
    ->run();

whitelist

This is a shortcut for ->config('tessedit_char_whitelist', 'abcdef....').

echo (new TesseractOCR('img.png'))
    ->whitelist(range('a', 'z'), range(0, 9), '-_@')
    ->run();

Other options

Tesseract offers incredible control to the user through its 600+ configuration options. You can see the complete list by running the following command:

$ tesseract --print-parameters
Tesseract parameters:
... long list with all parameters ...

echo (new TesseractOCR('img.png'))
    ->config('config_var', 'value')
    ->config('other_config_var', 'other value')
    ->run();

// or better yet, just cammel case any of the options:

echo (new TesseractOCR('img.png'))
    ->configVar('value')
    ->otherConfigVar('other value')
    ->run();

Where to get help

#tesseract-ocr-for-php on freenode IRC.

License

Apache License 2.0.