Java OCR CLI Tool using Tess4J

This project is a Command-Line Interface (CLI) application for extracting text from images and PDFs using the Tess4J library, which provides Tesseract-based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality. The extracted text can be copied to the clipboard for easy use.

Features

• Extract text from images (PNG, JPG, etc.)
• Extract text from PDFs
• Supports multiple languages (e.g., English, Sinhala)
• Automatically copies extracted text to the clipboard

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have the following installed:

• Java 17 or higher
• Maven (for building the project)
• Tesseract-OCR trained data files (.traineddata files) for the required languages. Place these files in the tessdata/ directory.

Installation

1. Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/senurah/java-tess4J-ocr.git
cd java-tess4J-ocr

2. Download and Setup Tess4J

Ensure that the tessdata folder contains the correct .traineddata files for the languages you need (e.g., English, Sinhala).

3. Build the Project

mvn clean package

This will create a JAR file in the target/ directory.

4. Configure Tesseract Data Path

In the OCRProcessor.java file, you need to set the correct path to the tessdata directory, which contains the trained language data files.

Update the following line:

this.tesseract.setDatapath("C:/Users/YourUsername/Project/java-ocr-tess4j/tessdata");

Replace the path with the location of your tessdata folder. For example:

• For Windows: C:/Users/YourUsername/Project/tessdata
• For Linux/Mac: /home/YourUsername/Project/tessdata

This step is crucial to ensure that the correct language data is used for OCR.

Running the Application

To run the application, use the following command:

java -jar target/java-ocr-tess4j-1.0-SNAPSHOT-shaded.jar <image_or_pdf_path> <language>

• <image_or_pdf_path>: Path to the image or PDF file you want to process.
• <language>: Language for OCR (e.g., eng for English, sin for Sinhala).

Example:

java -jar target/java-ocr-tess4j-1.0-SNAPSHOT-shaded.jar ./src/images/testocr.png eng

This will extract the text from the image and copy it to the clipboard.

Project Structure

The project structure is as follows:

.
├── src
│   ├── main
│   │   ├── java
│   │   │   └── ocr
│   │   │       ├── ReadImagesCLI.java
│   │   │       ├── OCRProcessor.java
│   |   |       └── OCRTestConcept.java
│   │   └── resources
│   ├── test
│   │   └── java
├── tessdata
│   └── eng.traineddata
│   └── sin.traineddata
├── target
│   └── java-ocr-tess4j-1.0-SNAPSHOT-shaded.jar
├── pom.xml
└── README.md

• ReadImagesCLI.java: The main class for running the CLI application.
• OCRProcessor.java: Handles OCR logic for both images and PDFs.
• OCRTestConcept.java: Testing concept class for Tesseract OCR.
• tessdata/: Contains Tesseract language data files.
• pom.xml: Maven configuration file.

Dependencies

This project uses the following dependencies:

• Tess4J: Java wrapper for Tesseract-OCR
• PDFBox: For rendering PDF files into images (used when processing PDFs)
• JAI Image I/O: For reading various image formats

These dependencies are managed via Maven. You can find the complete list of dependencies in the pom.xml file.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests if you would like to improve the project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.

Contact

For any questions or suggestions, feel free to open an issue or contact me at email.

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