[FIXED] Bounding boxes around characters for tesseract 4.0.0-beta.1

Issue

I am trying to do number plate recognition using tesseract 4.0.0-beta.1. In tesseract documentation, it is told to create box files in the form . I tried using "makebox" function. But, it is not detecting every character properly. Then, somewhere i read that this function is for version 3.x.

I later tried "wordstrbox" function. But the box file which is created in this way is empty. Can someone tell me how to create box files for tesseract 4.0.0-beta.1.

Solution

Use pytesseract.image_to_data()

import pytesseract
import cv2
from pytesseract import Output

img = cv2.imread('image.jpg')
d = pytesseract.image_to_data(img, output_type=Output.DICT)
n_boxes = len(d['level'])
for i in range(n_boxes):
    (text,x,y,w,h) = (d['text'][i],d['left'][i],d['top'][i],d['width'][i],d['height'][i])
    cv2.rectangle(img, (x,y), (x+w,y+h) , (0,255,0), 2)
cv2.imshow('img',img)
cv2.waitkey(0)

Among the data returned by pytesseract.image_to_data():

• left is the distance from the upper-left corner of the bounding box, to the left border of the image.
• top is the distance from the upper-left corner of the bounding box, to the top border of the image.
• width and height are the width and height of the bounding box.
• conf is the model's confidence for the prediction for the word within that bounding box. If conf is -1, that means that the corresponding bounding box contains a block of text, rather than just a single word.

The bounding boxes returned by pytesseract.image_to_boxes() enclose letters so I believe pytesseract.image_to_data() is what you're looking for.

Answered By - AlfyFaisy