An Open Source Tesseract Based Optical Character Recognizer for Bengali Language
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of extracting text from an image. The main purpose of an OCR is to make editable documents from existing paper documents or image files. OCR primarily works in two phases; they are character and word detection. In case of more sophisticated approach, an OCR also works on sentence detection to preserve documents’ structures. In this paper, we would discuss the process of developing an OCR for Bengali language. Lots of efforts have been put on developing an OCR for Bengali. Though some OCRs have been developed, none of them is completely error free. For our thesis, we trained Tesseract OCR Engine to develop an OCR for Bengali language. Tesseract is currently the most accurate OCR engine. This engine was developed at HP labs and currently sponsored by Google. In Tesseract there are two option to training first one is Legacy Training and second is LSTM Training. We do both of them.