Optical Character Recognition

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It is the procedure that transforms a text image into a text format that computers can read. OCR generally scans the image and extracts the text from the image that we can store in any string variable. OCRs are used to read receipts, cheques, code scanners, license plate scanners, and other numerous applications.

The libraries used will be:

• tesseract: It is a Neural Net LSTM-based OCR engine that is used for text recognition.
• magick: This library is used for image processing in R. We can print the image and also required for Tesseract.

The Tesseract package provides R bindings Tesseract: a powerful optical character recognition (OCR) engine that supports over 100 languages. The engine is highly configurable to tune the detection algorithms and obtain the best possible results.

Syntax

To perform Optical Character Recognition, we simply use the ocr() method and pass the file.

text <- ocr(pngfile)
cat(text)

ocr method takes the png file and extracts the text using its pre-trained model.

OCR transforms text images into machine-readable formats. With applications ranging from receipts to license plates, we explore the process, syntax, and examples, demonstrating its versatility. In this tutorial, we will learn to perform Optical Character Recognition in R programming language using the Tesseract and Magick libraries.