Home

Awesome

Tesseract OCR for Node.js

Build Status npm npm Known Vulnerabilities

Installation

First, you need to install the Tesseract project. Instructions for installing Tesseract for all platforms can be found on the project site. On Debian/Ubuntu:

apt-get install tesseract-ocr

After you've installed Tesseract, you can go installing the npm-package:

npm install node-tesseract-ocr

Usage

const tesseract = require("node-tesseract-ocr")

const config = {
  lang: "eng", // default
  oem: 3,
  psm: 3,
}

async function main() {
  try {
    const text = await tesseract.recognize("image.jpg", config)
    console.log("Result:", text)
  } catch (error) {
    console.log(error.message)
  }
}

main()

Also you can pass URL:

const img = "https://tesseract.projectnaptha.com/img/eng_bw.png"
const text = await tesseract.recognize(img)

or Buffer:

const tesseract = require("node-tesseract-ocr")
const fs = require("fs/promises")

async function main() {
  const img = await fs.readFile("image.jpg")
  const text = await tesseract.recognize(img)

  console.log("Result:", text)
}

If you want to process multiple images in a single run, then pass an array:

const images = ["./samples/file1.png", "./samples/file2.png"]
const text = await tesseract.recognize(images)

In the config object you can pass any OCR options. Also you can pass here any control parameters or use ready-made sets of config files (like hocr):

await tesseract.recognize("image.jpg", {
  load_system_dawg: 0,
  tessedit_char_whitelist: "0123456789",
  presets: ["tsv"],
})

Alternatives

If you want to use Tesseract in the browser, choose Tesseract.js package, which compiles original Tesseract from C to JavaScript WebAssembly. You can also use it in Node.js, but the performance may not be as good.