---
title: "Optical Character Recognition with imagerExtra"
author: "Shota Ochi"
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
output: rmarkdown::html_vignette
vignette: >
  %\VignetteIndexEntry{Optical Character Recognition with imagerExtra}
  %\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown}
  %\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8}
---

<style type="text/css">

body, td {
   font-size: 15px;
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```{r setup, include = FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(warning = FALSE, message = FALSE, cache = FALSE, 
               comment = NA, verbose = TRUE, fig.width = 5, fig.height = 5, dev = 'jpeg', dev.args=list(quality=50))
is_available_tesseract <- requireNamespace("tesseract", quietly = TRUE)
```

You need the R package tesseract, which is bindings to a powerful optical character recognition (OCR) engine, to do OCR with imagerExtra.

See the [installation guide of tesseract](https://github.com/ropensci/tesseract#installation) if you haven't installed tesseract.

ocr function of tesseract works best for images with high contrast, little noise, and horizontal text.

ocr function doesn't show a good performance for degraded images as shown below.
```{r, fig.height = 3, eval = is_available_tesseract}
library(imagerExtra)
plot(papers, main = "Original")
OCR(papers) %>% print
OCR_data(papers) %>% print
```

OCR function and OCR_data function are wrappers for ocr function and ocr_data function of tesseract.

We can see OCR function and OCR_data function failed to recognize the text "Hello".

We need to clean the image before using OCR function.

```{r, fig.height = 3, eval = is_available_tesseract}
hello <- DenoiseDCT(papers, 0.01) %>% ThresholdAdaptive(., 0.1, range = c(0,1))
plot(hello, main = "Hello")
OCR(hello) %>% print
OCR_data(hello) %>% print
```

We can see the text "Hello" was recognized.

Using tesseract in combination with imagerExtra enables us to extract text from degraded images.