gocr - Man Page

• Recognize characters in the [i]nput image and [o]utput it in the given file. Put the database ([p]) in path/to/db_directory (verify that the folder exists or DB usage will silently be skipped). [m]ode 130 means create + use + extend database: gocr -m 130 -p path/to/db_directory -i path/to/input_image.png -o path/to/output_file.txt
• Recognize characters and assume all [C]haracters are numbers: gocr -m 130 -p path/to/db_directory -i path/to/input_image.png -o path/to/output_file.txt -C "0..9"
• Recognize characters with a cert[a]inty of 100% (characters have a higher chance to be treated as unknown): gocr -m 130 -p path/to/db_directory -i path/to/input_image.png -o path/to/output_file.txt -a 100

tldr.sh

gocr [OPTION] [-i] pnm-file

gocr is an optical character recognition program that can be used from the command line.  It takes input in PNM, PGM, PBM, PPM, or PCX format, and writes recognized text to stdout.  If the pnm file is a single dash, PNM data is read from stdin. If gzip, bzip2 and netpbm-progs are installed and your system supports popen(3) also pnm.gz, pnm.bz2, png, jpg, jpeg, tiff, gif, bmp, ps (only single pages) and eps are supported as input files (not as input stream), where pnm can be replaced by one of ppm, pgm and pbm.

-h

show usage information

-V

show version information

-i file

read input from file (or stdin if file is a single dash)

-o file

send output to file instead of stdout

-e file

send errors to file instead of stderr or to stdout if file is a dash

-x file

progress output to file (file can be a file name, a fifo name or a file descriptor 1...255), this is useful for GUI developpers to show the OCR progress, the file descriptor argument is only available, if compiled with __USE_POSIX defined

-p path

database path, a final slash must be included, default is ./db/, this path will be populated with images of learned characters

-f format

output format of the recognized text  (ISO8859_1 TeX HTML XML UTF8 ASCII), XML will also output position and probability data

-l level

set grey level to level (0<160<=255, default: 0 for autodetect), darker pixels belong to characters, brighter pixels are interpreted as background of the input image

-d size

set dust size in pixels (clusters smaller than this are removed), 0 means no clusters are removed, the default is -1 for auto detection

-s num

set spacewidth between words in units of dots (default: 0 for autodetect), wider widths are interpreted as word spaces, smaller as character spaces

-v verbosity

be verbose to stderr; verbosity is a bitfield

-c string

only verbose output of characters from string to stderr, more output is generated for all characters within the string, the underscore stands for unknown chars, this function is usefull to limit debug information to the necessary one

-C string

only recognise characters from string, this is a filter function in cases where the interest is only to a part of the character alphabet, you can use 0-9 or a-z to specify ranges, use -- to detect the minus sign

-a certainty

set value for certainty of recognition (0..100; default: 95), characters with a higher certainty are accepted, characters with a lower certainty are treated as unknown (not recognized); set higher values, if you want to have only more certain recognized characters

-u string

output this string for every unrecognized character (default is "_")

-m mode

set oprational mode; mode is a bitfield (default: 0)

-n bool

if bool is non-zero, only recognise numbers (this is now obsolete, use -C "0123456789")

The verbosity is specified as a bitfield:

1

print more info

2

list shapes of boxes (see -c) to stderr

4

list pattern of boxes (see -c) to stderr

8

print pattern after recognition for debugging

16

print debug information about recognition of lines to stderr

32

create outXX.png with boxes and lines marked on each general OCR-step

The operation modes are:

2

use database to recognize characters which are not recognized by other algorithms, (early development)

4

switching on layout analysis or zoning (development)

8

don't compare unrecognized characters to recognized one

16

don't try to divide overlapping characters to two or three single characters

32

don't do context correction

64

character packing, before recognition starts, similar characters are searched and only one of this characters will be send to the recognition engine (development)

130

extend database, prompts user for unidentified characters and extends the database with users answer (128+2, early development)

256

switch off the recognition engine (makes sense together with -m 2)

Joerg Schulenburg (see http://www-e.uni-magdeburg.de/jschulen/ocr/ for EMAIL)
First version of man page by Tim Waugh <twaugh@redhat.com>

This man page documents gocr, version 0.52.

Report bugs to Joerg Schulenburg

More details can be found at /usr/share/doc/gocr-X.XX/gocr.html. Also read /usr/share/doc/gocr-X.XX/README to learn, how to improve results.

gocr -v 33 text1.pbm

output verbose information, out30.png is created to see details of recognition process

gocr -v 7 -c _YV text1.pbm

verbose output for unknown chars and chars Y and V

djpeg -pnm -gray text.jpg | gocr -

convert a jpeg file to pnm format and input via pipe