Trying to read text from image using pytesseract but getting blank

Question

I've taken a few pictures , and am using openCV to crop these images so i only have the relevant text . This is the picture i've taken (i.e the cropped photo):

I try to feed this image to the image_to_string function of pytesseract but when i print the output this is what i get

text from cropped image from code is '
♀ '

Any help as to how i can get the exact reading. Tried using

text2 = pytesseract.image_to_string(cropped_image) ,config='--psm 6') 

but this gives a garbage value

Answer 1

Tarun Chakitha is right, you'll need some pre-processing, thresholding, and morphological transformations to get reliable results. The following code produces Pac=2666. 1W

# Obtain binary image
img_bgr = cv2.imread("3CxLj.jpg")
img_gray = cv2.cvtColor(img_bgr[90:200, 0:495], cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
img_bin = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(
    img_gray, 255, cv2.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_MEAN_C, cv2.THRESH_BINARY, 21, 15
)
fig, axs = plt.subplots(3)
axs[0].imshow(img_gray, cmap="gray")
axs[1].imshow(img_bin, cmap="gray")

# Merge dots into characters using erosion
kernel = np.ones((5, 5), np.uint8)
img_eroded = cv2.erode(img_bin, kernel, iterations=1)
axs[2].imshow(img_eroded, cmap="gray")
fig.show()

# Obtain string using psm 8 (treat the image as a single word)
ocr_string = pytesseract.image_to_string(img_eroded, config="--psm 8")
print(ocr_string)