How to use Tesseract OCR in C# in modern era
Added: (Fri Oct 22 2021)
Real World Accuracy
Tesseract as a library was designed for perfect documents where a machine printed out high-resolution text to a screen and then read it. That is what Tesseract is good at: reading perfect documents.
The problem is that in the real world, that is not what we have. If Tesseract encounters an image which is rotated, skewed, is of a low DPI, scanned, or has background noise, it becomes almost impossible for Tesseract to get data from that image. In addition, Tesseract will also take a very long time to process that document before giving you back nonsense information.
In the below example, we can see that a simple document that is very easy to read by the eye cannot be read by Tesseract well. However, the below code example and output shows that Iron OCR is significantly more appropriate for real world use cases.
The Truth of Using Tesseract
Tesseract is a library for reading straight and perfect text of standardized typefaces. To use Tesseract when we are using scanned or photographed documents where the images are not digitally perfect like screenshots, we need to perform image preprocessing. This is normally done with Photoshop batch scripts or advanced ImageMagick usage.
Generally, this needs to be developed on a case by case basis for each type of document you are trying to deal with and can take weeks of development.
The key selling point of Iron OCR is that it takes all of this away. Iron OCR has simple variables which you can use to automatically detect and preprocess all of your images so that you get your text out without weeks of developing for specific image use cases. watch tutorial here https://dev.to/mhamzap10/how-to-use-tesseract-ocr-in-c-9gc
Fault Tolerance
In addition, Iron OCR has an excellent error model where it gets very specific information if a fault has occurred during an OCR process so that you know exactly what has gone wrong and you can correct it, rather than being left with a generic or null error.
In conclusion, Tesseract is an excellent resource for developers, but it is not a complete OCR library when dealing with scanned or photographed images because these images need to be processed so as to be orthogonal, standardized, high-resolution, and free of digital noise before Tesseract can accurately work with them.
In contrast, Iron OCR can do this automatically in a single line of code. We think it is worth it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LV93ZDeHwZdYIqH4H_Brfd00vSVtP8KP/view?usp=sharing
https://ironsoftware.com/csharp/ocr/licensing/