Tesseract OCR - AI SDKs and Libraries Tool

Overview

Tesseract OCR is a mature, open-source optical character recognition engine originally developed by HP and maintained by an open-source community with contributions from Google and others. It combines a proven legacy character-recognition mode with a modern LSTM-based neural OCR engine, enabling robust recognition across scanned documents, photographs, and multi-page TIFFs. Tesseract supports recognition for over 100 languages and scripts through downloadable traineddata files, and it produces multiple output formats including plain text, hOCR (HTML with positional data), searchable PDF, and TSV for structured extraction. The engine is configurable via command-line options (OCR Engine Mode and Page Segmentation Mode) to tune behavior for single-line text, blocks of text, sparse text, or full pages. Tesseract is commonly embedded in server pipelines, desktop apps, and mobile clients via language-specific wrappers (for example, pytesseract for Python, Tess4J for Java, and tess-two for Android). It includes tooling and workflows for training or fine-tuning language models using LSTM-based training data and can be extended with custom language packs. According to the project's GitHub repository, the codebase and language data are actively maintained, and a large ecosystem of third-party wrappers, integrations, and community-contributed traineddata sets makes Tesseract a practical choice for many production OCR use cases.

Installation

Install via brew:

brew install tesseract

tesseract --version

Key Features

• LSTM-based OCR engine for neural-network-driven recognition and improved accuracy
• Legacy engine mode for pattern-based recognition and backward compatibility
• Supports 100+ languages via downloadable .traineddata language packs
• Outputs plain text, hOCR, searchable PDF, and TSV with positional metadata
• Configurable OCR Engine Mode (OEM) and Page Segmentation Mode (PSM) options
• Accepts common image formats (PNG, JPEG, TIFF) and multi-page TIFFs
• Tools and workflows for LSTM training and creating custom language packs
• Wide ecosystem of wrappers: pytesseract (Python), Tess4J (Java), tess-two (Android)

Community

Tesseract is an actively maintained open-source project hosted on GitHub with a large user base and many third-party wrappers and integrations. The community maintains language traineddata repositories, training scripts, and documentation; users and developers discuss issues and feature requests via GitHub Issues and community forums. Because of widespread adoption, community feedback and examples are abundant on Stack Overflow, blog posts, and GitHub repositories. According to the project's GitHub repository, development and contributions continue, and community-contributed language packs and training resources are regularly updated.

Key Information

• Category: SDKs and Libraries
• Type: AI SDKs and Libraries Tool