Technology

Tesseract OCR

Tesseract OCR is the premier open-source Optical Character Recognition engine (Apache 2.0 license), originally developed by HP and later sponsored by Google, recognizing over 100 languages.

Tesseract is a high-performance OCR engine, released as open-source in 2005 after its initial development by Hewlett-Packard (1985–1994). Google sponsored its development from 2006 to 2018, significantly advancing its capabilities. The current stable version, Tesseract 5, incorporates an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) neural network for superior line recognition, a major upgrade from the legacy character pattern engine. It operates as a command-line program and library, supporting over 100 languages out-of-the-box and offering multiple output formats (e.g., plain text, PDF, TSV). Developers widely adopt it via wrappers like Pytesseract for Python integration, leveraging its robust, freely available text extraction power.