jaidedai/easyocr

EasyOCR is a Python library that reads text out of images. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, the process of turning a picture of words into actual editable text. The problem it solves is that extracting text from photos, scanned documents, or screenshots normally requires complex setup, EasyOCR aims to make that as simple as a few lines of code. It supports over 80 languages, including Latin scripts, Chinese, Arabic, Devanagari, and Cyrillic. You point it at an image file (or pass in a URL, or a raw image object), tell it which languages to detect, and it returns the recognized text along with the position of each piece of text in the image and a confidence score. Internally it combines two deep learning models: a detection model that finds where text is in the image, and a recognition model, a CRNN, which stands for Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network, that reads the text at each location. The recognition model chains together a feature-extraction step, a sequence-labeling step using LSTM (a type of recurrent network good at ordered data), and a decoding step. All of this runs on PyTorch. Someone would use EasyOCR when they need to extract text from real-world photos, receipts, street signs, screenshots, or any image containing writing. It works on CPU if no GPU is available, making it accessible on ordinary laptops. Installation is a single pip command.