Extracting text from an image can be exhausting, especially when you have a lot to extract. One commonly known text extraction library is PyTesseract,

Extraction of text from a Table Image, using PyTesseract and OpenCV

submited by

Style Pass

2020-06-25 18:59:58

Extracting text from an image can be exhausting, especially when you have a lot to extract. One commonly known text extraction library is PyTesseract, an optical character recognition (OCR). This library will provide you text given an image.

PyTesseract is really helpful, the first time I knew PyTesseract, I directly used it to detect some a short text and the result is satisfying. Then, I used it to detect text from a table but the algorithm failed perform.

Figure 1 depicts the text detection result, with green boxes enclosing the detected words. You may realized that most of the text can’t be detected by the algorithm, especially numbers. In my case, these numbers are the essentials of the data, giving me value of daily COVID-19 cases from a local government in my hometown. So, how extract these information?

When writing an algorithm, I always try to think as if I’m teaching the algorithm the way humans do. This way, I can easily put the idea into more detailed algorithms.