Java OCR library

Question

I'm looking for some open optical character recognition (OCR) raw libraries that I can use to create a Java application that compares them. Anywhere I search I find just applications to OCR.

Answer 1

You can use

• http://tess4j.sourceforge.net/
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/javaocr/

I have used tesseract (first option) and found that it is quite accurate (not 100% in my case). I directly used trained data for recognition. You can start with following code.

    Tesseract tess = new Tesseract();

    tess.setDatapath(tessDataPath); //Path to tessdata directory

    String text = tess.doOCR(new File(path)); // Path to input image

    System.out.println(text)

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

If you are interested in a commercial solution, you can check out the LEADTOOLS OCR SDK. There is no machine training needed and it can run straight out of the box. Disclaimer: I am an employee of this company.

OCR can be performed on an image with only a few lines of code:

OcrEngine ocrEngine = OcrEngineManager.createEngine(OcrEngineType.LEAD);
ocrEngine.startup(null, null, null, null);
ocrEngine.getAutoRecognizeManager().run("C:\\in.tif", "C:\\out.pdf",
   DocumentFormat.PDF, null);