An Overview of the Tesseract OCR Engine

Ray Smith Google Inc. [email protected] Abstract

The Tesseract OCR engine, as was the HP Research Prototype in the UNLV Fourth Annual Test of OCR Accuracy[1], is described in a comprehensive overview. Emphasis is placed on aspects that are novel or at least unusual in an OCR engine, including in particular the line finding, features/classification methods, and the adaptive classifier.

2. Architecture
Since HP had independently-developed page layout analysis technology that was used in products, (and therefore not released for open-source) Tesseract never needed its own page layout analysis. Tesseract therefore assumes that its input is a binary image with optional polygonal text regions defined. Processing follows a traditional step-by-step pipeline, but some of the stages were unusual in their day, and possibly remain so even now. The first step is a connected component analysis in which outlines of the components are stored. This was a computationally expensive design decision at the time, but had a significant advantage: by inspection of the nesting of outlines, and the number of child and grandchild outlines, it is simple to detect inverse text and recognize it as easily as black-on-white text. Tesseract was probably the first OCR engine able to handle white-on-black text so trivially. At this stage, outlines are gathered together, purely by nesting, into Blobs. Blobs are organized into text lines, and the lines and regions are analyzed for fixed pitch or proportional text. Text lines are broken into words differently according to the kind of character spacing. Fixed pitch text is chopped immediately by character cells. Proportional text is broken into words using definite spaces and fuzzy spaces. Recognition then proceeds as a two-pass process. In the first pass, an attempt is made to recognize each word in turn. Each word that is satisfactory is passed to an adaptive classifier as training data. The adaptive classifier then gets a chance to more accurately recognize text lower down the page. Since the adaptive classifier may have learned something useful too late to make a contribution near the top of the page, a second pass is run over the page, in which words that were not recognized well enough are recognized again. A final phase resolves fuzzy spaces, and checks alternative hypotheses for the x-height to locate smallcap text.

1. Introduction Motivation and History

Tesseract is an open-source OCR engine that was developed at HP between 1984 and 1994. Like a supernova, it appeared from nowhere for the 1995 UNLV Annual Test of OCR Accuracy [1], shone brightly with its results, and then vanished back under the same cloak of secrecy under which it had been developed. Now for the first time, details of the architecture and algorithms can be revealed. Tesseract began as a PhD research project [2] in HP Labs, Bristol, and gained momentum as a possible software and/or hardware add-on for HPs line of flatbed scanners. Motivation was provided by the fact that the commercial OCR engines of the day were in their infancy, and failed miserably on anything but the best quality print. After a joint project between HP Labs Bristol, and HPs scanner division in Colorado, Tesseract had a significant lead in accuracy over the commercial engines, but did not become a product. The next stage of its development was back in HP Labs Bristol as an investigation of OCR for compression. Work concentrated more on improving rejection efficiency than on base-level accuracy. At the end of this project, at the end of 1994, development ceased entirely. The engine was sent to UNLV for the 1995 Annual Test of OCR Accuracy[1], where it proved its worth against the commercial engines of the time. In late 2005, HP released Tesseract for open source. It is now available at http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr.

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3. Line and Word Finding

3.1. Line Finding
The line finding algorithm is one of the few parts of Tesseract that has previously been published [3]. The line finding algorithm is designed so that a skewed page can be recognized without having to de-skew, thus saving loss of image quality. The key parts of the process are blob filtering and line construction. Assuming that page layout analysis has already provided text regions of a roughly uniform text size, a simple percentile height filter removes drop-caps and vertically touching characters. The median height approximates the text size in the region, so it is safe to filter out blobs that are smaller than some fraction of the median height, being most likely punctuation, diacritical marks and noise. The filtered blobs are more likely to fit a model of non-overlapping, parallel, but sloping lines. Sorting and processing the blobs by x-coordinate makes it possible to assign blobs to a unique text line, while tracking the slope across the page, with greatly reduced danger of assigning to an incorrect text line in the presence of skew. Once the filtered blobs have been assigned to lines, a least median of squares fit [4] is used to estimate the baselines, and the filtered-out blobs are fitted back into the appropriate lines. The final step of the line creation process merges blobs that overlap by at least half horizontally, putting diacritical marks together with the correct base and correctly associating parts of some broken characters.

Fig.1 shows an example of a line of text with a fitted baseline, descender line, meanline and ascender line. All these lines are parallel (the y separation is a constant over the entire length) and slightly curved. The ascender line is cyan (prints as light gray) and the black line above it is actually straight. Close inspection shows that the cyan/gray line is curved relative to the straight black line above it.

3.3. Fixed Pitch Detection and Chopping

Tesseract tests the text lines to determine whether they are fixed pitch. Where it finds fixed pitch text, Tesseract chops the words into characters using the pitch, and disables the chopper and associator on these words for the word recognition step. Fig. 2 shows a typical example of a fixed-pitch word.

Fig. 2. A fixed-pitch chopped word.

3.4. Proportional Word Finding

Non-fixed-pitch or proportional text spacing is a highly non-trivial task. Fig. 3 illustrates some typical problems. The gap between the tens and units of 11.9% is a similar size to the general space, and is certainly larger than the kerned space between erated and junk. There is no horizontal gap at all between the bounding boxes of of and financial. Tesseract solves most of these problems by measuring gaps in a limited vertical range between the baseline and mean line. Spaces that are close to the threshold at this stage are made fuzzy, so that a final decision can be made after word recognition.

3.2. Baseline Fitting

Once the text lines have been found, the baselines are fitted more precisely using a quadratic spline. This was another first for an OCR system, and enabled Tesseract to handle pages with curved baselines [5], which are a common artifact in scanning, and not just at book bindings. The baselines are fitted by partitioning the blobs into groups with a reasonably continuous displacement for the original straight baseline. A quadratic spline is fitted to the most populous partition, (assumed to be the baseline) by a least squares fit. The quadratic spline has the advantage that this calculation is reasonably stable, but the disadvantage that discontinuities can arise when multiple spline segments are required. A more traditional cubic spline [6] might work better.

Fig. 3. Some difficult word spacing.

4. Word Recognition
Part of the recognition process for any character recognition engine is to identify how a word should be segmented into characters. The initial segmentation output from line finding is classified first. The rest of the word recognition step applies only to non-fixedpitch text.

Fig. 1. An example of a curved fitted baseline.

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4.1 Chopping Joined Characters

While the result from a word (see section 6) is unsatisfactory, Tesseract attempts to improve the result by chopping the blob with worst confidence from the character classifier. Candidate chop points are found from concave vertices of a polygonal approximation [2] of the outline, and may have either another concave vertex opposite, or a line segment. It may take up to 3 pairs of chop points to successfully separate joined characters from the ASCII set.

When the A* segmentation search was first implemented in about 1989, Tesseracts accuracy on broken characters was well ahead of the commercial engines of the day. Fig. 5 is a typical example. An essential part of that success was the character classifier that could easily recognize broken characters.

5. Static Character Classifier

5.1. Features
An early version of Tesseract used topological features developed from the work of Shillman et. al. [78] Though nicely independent of font and size, these features are not robust to the problems found in reallife images, as Bokser [9] describes. An intermediate idea involved the use of segments of the polygonal approximation as features, but this approach is also not robust to damaged characters. For example, in Fig. 6(a), the right side of the shaft is in two main pieces, but in Fig. 6(b) there is just a single piece.

Fig. 4. Candidate chop points and chop. Fig. 4 shows a set of candidate chop points with arrows and the selected chop as a line across the outline where the r touches the m. Chops are executed in priority order. Any chop that fails to improve the confidence of the result is undone, but not completely discarded so that the chop can be re-used later by the associator if needed.

4.2. Associating Broken Characters

When the potential chops have been exhausted, if the word is still not good enough, it is given to the associator. The associator makes an A* (best first) search of the segmentation graph of possible combinations of the maximally chopped blobs into candidate characters. It does this without actually building the segmentation graph, but instead maintains a hash table of visited states. The A* search proceeds by pulling candidate new states from a priority queue and evaluating them by classifying unclassified combinations of fragments. It may be argued that this fully-chop-then-associate approach is at best inefficient, at worst liable to miss important chops, and that may well be the case. The advantage is that the chop-then-associate scheme simplifies the data structures that would be required to maintain the full segmentation graph. Fig. 6. (a) Pristine h, (b) broken h, (c) features matched to prototypes. The breakthrough solution is the idea that the features in the unknown need not be the same as the features in the training data. During training, the segments of a polygonal approximation [2] are used for features, but in recognition, features of a small, fixed length (in normalized units) are extracted from the outline and matched many-to-one against the clustered prototype features of the training data. In Fig. 6(c), the short, thick lines are the features extracted from the unknown, and the thin, longer lines are the clustered segments of the polygonal approximation that are used as prototypes. One prototype bridging the two pieces is completely unmatched. Three features on one side and two on the other are unmatched, but, apart from those, every prototype and every feature is well matched. This example shows that this process of small features matching large prototypes is easily able to cope with recognition of damaged images. Its main problem is that the computational cost of computing the distance between an unknown and a prototype is very high.

Fig. 5. An easily recognized word.

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The features extracted from the unknown are thus 3dimensional, (x, y position, angle), with typically 50100 features in a character, and the prototype features are 4-dimensional (x, y, position, angle, length), with typically 10-20 features in a prototype configuration.

5.2. Classification
Classification proceeds as a two-step process. In the first step, a class pruner creates a shortlist of character classes that the unknown might match. Each feature fetches, from a coarsely quantized 3-dimensional lookup table, a bit-vector of classes that it might match, and the bit-vectors are summed over all the features. The classes with the highest counts (after correcting for expected number of features) become the short-list for the next step. Each feature of the unknown looks up a bit vector of prototypes of the given class that it might match, and then the actual similarity between them is computed. Each prototype character class is represented by a logical sum-of-product expression with each term called a configuration, so the distance calculation process keeps a record of the total similarity evidence of each feature in each configuration, as well as of each prototype. The best combined distance, which is calculated from the summed feature and prototype evidences, is the best over all the stored configurations of the class.

word. The final decision for a given segmentation is simply the word with the lowest total distance rating, where each of the above categories is multiplied by a different constant. Words from different segmentations may have different numbers of characters in them. It is hard to compare these words directly, even where a classifier claims to be producing probabilities, which Tesseract does not. This problem is solved in Tesseract by generating two numbers for each character classification. The first, called the confidence, is minus the normalized distance from the prototype. This enables it to be a confidence in the sense that greater numbers are better, but still a distance, as, the farther from zero, the greater the distance. The second output, called the rating, multiplies the normalized distance from the prototype by the total outline length in the unknown character. Ratings for characters within a word can be summed meaningfully, since the total outline length for all characters within a word is always the same.

7. Adaptive Classifier
It has been suggested [11] and demonstrated [12] that OCR engines can benefit from the use of an adaptive classifier. Since the static classifier has to be good at generalizing to any kind of font, its ability to discriminate between different characters or between characters and non-characters is weakened. A more font-sensitive adaptive classifier that is trained by the output of the static classifier is therefore commonly [13] used to obtain greater discrimination within each document, where the number of fonts is limited. Tesseract does not employ a template classifier, but uses the same features and classifier as the static classifier. The only significant difference between the static classifier and the adaptive classifier, apart from the training data, is that the adaptive classifier uses isotropic baseline/x-height normalization, whereas the static classifier normalizes characters by the centroid (first moments) for position and second moments for anisotropic size normalization. The baseline/x-height normalization makes it easier to distinguish upper and lower case characters as well as improving immunity to noise specks. The main benefit of character moment normalization is removal of font aspect ratio and some degree of font stroke width. It also makes recognition of sub and superscripts simpler, but requires an additional classifier feature to distinguish some upper and lower case characters. Fig. 7 shows an example of 3 letters in baseline/x-height normalized form and moment normalized form.

5.3. Training Data

Since the classifier is able to recognize damaged characters easily, the classifier was not trained on damaged characters. In fact, the classifier was trained on a mere 20 samples of 94 characters from 8 fonts in a single size, but with 4 attributes (normal, bold, italic, bold italic), making a total of 60160 training samples. This is a significant contrast to other published classifiers, such as the Calera classifier with more than a million samples [9], and Bairds 100-font classifier [10] with 1175000 training samples.

6. Linguistic Analysis
Tesseract contains relatively little linguistic analysis. Whenever the word recognition module is considering a new segmentation, the linguistic module (mis-named the permuter) chooses the best available word string in each of the following categories: Top frequent word, Top dictionary word, Top numeric word, Top UPPER case word, Top lower case word (with optional initial upper), Top classifier choice

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source, the ISRI group at UNLV for sharing their tools and data, as well as Luc Vincent, Igor Krivokon, DarShyang Lee, and Thomas Kielbus for their comments on the content of this paper. Fig. 7. Baseline and moment normalized letters.

11. References
[1] S.V. Rice, F.R. Jenkins, T.A. Nartker, The Fourth Annual Test of OCR Accuracy, Technical Report 95-03, Information Science Research Institute, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, July 1995. [2] R.W. Smith, The Extraction and Recognition of Text from Multimedia Document Images, PhD Thesis, University of Bristol, November 1987. [3] R. Smith, A Simple and Efficient Skew Detection Algorithm via Text Row Accumulation, Proc. of the 3rd Int. Conf. on Document Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 2), IEEE 1995, pp. 1145-1148. [4] P.J. Rousseeuw, A.M. Leroy, Robust Regression and Outlier Detection, Wiley-IEEE, 2003. [5] S.V. Rice, G. Nagy, T.A. Nartker, Optical Character Recognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier, Kluwer Academic Publishers, USA 1999, pp. 57-60. [6] P.J. Schneider, An Algorithm for Automatically Fitting Digitized Curves, in A.S. Glassner, Graphics Gems I, Morgan Kaufmann, 1990, pp. 612-626. [7] R.J. Shillman, Character Recognition Based on Phenomenological Attributes: Theory and Methods, PhD. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1974. [8] B.A. Blesser, T.T. Kuklinski, R.J. Shillman, Empirical Tests for Feature Selection Based on a Pscychological Theory of Character Recognition, Pattern Recognition 8(2), Elsevier, New York, 1976. [9] M. Bokser, Omnidocument Technologies, Proc. IEEE 80(7), IEEE, USA, Jul 1992, pp. 1066-1078. [10] H.S. Baird, R. Fossey, A 100-Font Classifier, Proc. of the 1st Int. Conf. on Document Analysis and Recognition, IEEE, 1991, pp 332-340. [11] G. Nagy, At the frontiers of OCR, Proc. IEEE 80(7), IEEE, USA, Jul 1992, pp 1093-1100. [12] G. Nagy, Y. Xu, Automatic Prototype Extraction for Adaptive OCR, Proc. of the 4th Int. Conf. on Document Analysis and Recognition, IEEE, Aug 1997, pp 278-282. [13] I. Marosi, Industrial OCR approaches: architecture, algorithms and adaptation techniques, Document Recognition and Retrieval XIV, SPIE Jan 2007, 6500-01.

8. Results
Tesseract was included in the 4th UNLV annual test [1] of OCR accuracy, as HP Labs OCR, but the code has changed a lot since then, including conversion to Unicode and retraining. Table 1 compares results from a recent version of Tesseract (shown as 2.0) with the original 1995 results (shown as HP). All four 300 DPI binary test sets that were used in the 1995 test are shown, along with the number of errors (Errs), the percent error rate (%Err) and the percent change relative to the 1995 results (%Chg) for both character errors and non-stopword errors. [1] More up-to-date results are at http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr. Table 1. Results of Current and old Tesseract.
Ver HP 2.0 HP 2.0 HP 2.0 HP 2.0 2.0 Character Word Set Errs %Err %Chg Errs %Err %Chg bus 5959 1.86 1293 4.27 bus 6449 2.02 8.22 1295 4.28 0.15 doe 36349 2.48 7042 5.13 doe 29921 2.04 -17.68 6791 4.95 -3.56 mag 15043 2.26 3379 5.01 mag 14814 2.22 -1.52 3133 4.64 -7.28 news 6432 1.31 1502 3.06 news 7935 1.61 23.36 1284 2.62 -14.51 total 59119 -7.31 12503 -5.39

9. Conclusion and Further Work

After lying dormant for more than 10 years, Tesseract is now behind the leading commercial engines in terms of its accuracy. Its key strength is probably its unusual choice of features. Its key weakness is probably its use of a polygonal approximation as input to the classifier instead of the raw outlines. With internationalization done, accuracy could probably be improved significantly with the judicious addition of a Hidden-Markov-Model-based character ngram model, and possibly an improved chopper.

10. Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank John Burns and Tom Nartker for their efforts in making Tesseract open

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