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How to detect language or script from an input image using Python or Tesseract OCR?

Given an input image which can be in any language or writing system, how do I detect what script the text in the picture uses?

Any Python-based or Tesseract-OCR based solution would be appreciated.

Note that script here means writing systems like Latin, Cyrillic, Devanagari, etc., for corresponding languages like English, Russian, Hindi, etc. (respectively)

Solution

  • Pre-requisites:

    • Install Tesseract: sudo apt install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-all
    • Install PyTessract: pip install pytesseract

    Script-Detection:

    import pytesseract
import re

def detect_image_lang(img_path):
    try:
        osd = pytesseract.image_to_osd(img_path)
        script = re.search("Script: ([a-zA-Z]+)\n", osd).group(1)
        conf = re.search("Script confidence: (\d+\.?(\d+)?)", osd).group(1)
        return script, float(conf)
    except e:
        return None, 0.0

script_name, confidence = detect_image_lang("image.png")

    Language-Detection:

    After performing OCR (using Tesseract), pass the text through langdetect library (or any other lib).