Introduction
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/wiki/TrainingTesseract3
Tesseract 3.0x is fully trainable. This page describes the training process, provides some guidelines on applicability to various languages, and what to expect from the results.
For training Tesseract 2.0x see TrainingTesseract.
Background and Limitations
Tesseract was originally designed to recognize English text only. Efforts have been made to modify the engine and its training system to make them able to deal with other languages and UTF-8 characters. Tesseract 3.0 can handle any Unicode characters (coded with UTF-8), but there are limits as to the range of languages that it will be successful with, so please take this section into account before building up your hopes that it will work well on your particular language!
Tesseract currently can only handle left-to-right languages. While you can get something out with a right-to-left language, the output file will be ordered as if the text were left-to-right. Top-to-bottom languages will be supported from 3.01.
Tesseract is unlikely to be able to handle connected scripts like Arabic. It will take some specialized algorithms to handle this case, and right now it doesn't have them.
Tesseract is slower with large character set languages (like Chinese), but it seems to work OK.
Any language that has different punctuation and numbers is going to be disadvantaged by some of the hard-coded algorithms that assume ASCII punctuation and digits. To be fixed in 3.0x for x>=2.
Data files required
To train for another language, you have to create some data files in the tessdata subdirectory, and then crunch these together into a single file, using combine_tessdata. The naming convention is languagecode.file_name Language codes for released files follow the ISO 639-3 standard, but any string can be used. The files used for English (3.00) are:
- tessdata/eng.config
- tessdata/eng.unicharset
- tessdata/eng.unicharambigs
- tessdata/eng.inttemp
- tessdata/eng.pffmtable
- tessdata/eng.normproto
- tessdata/eng.punc-dawg
- tessdata/eng.word-dawg
- tessdata/eng.number-dawg
- tessdata/eng.freq-dawg
... and the final crunched file is:
- tessdata/eng.traineddata
and
- tessdata/eng.user-words
The traineddata file is simply a concatenation of the input files, with a table of contents that contains the offsets of the known file types. See ccutil/tessdatamanager.h in the source code for a list of the currently accepted filenames. NOTE the files in the traineddata file are different from the list used prior to 3.00, and will most likely change, possibly dramatically in future revisions.
How little can you get away with?
You must create unicharset, inttemp, normproto, pfftable using the procedure described below. If you are only trying to recognize a limited range of fonts (like a single font for instance), then a single training page might be enough. The other files no longer need to be provided, but will most likely improve accuracy, depending on your application. The old DangAmbigs has been replaced by unicharambigs.
Training Procedure
Some of the procedure is inevitably manual. As much automated help as possible is provided. More automated tools may appear in the future, but will require a complex install/build process. The tools referenced below are all built in the training subdirectory.
Generate Training Images
The first step is to determine the full character set to be used, and prepare a text or word processor file containing a set of examples. The most important points to bear in mind when creating a training file are:
- Make sure there are a minimum number of samples of each character. 10 is good, but 5 is OK for rare characters.
- There should be more samples of the more frequent characters - at least 20.
- Don't make the mistake of grouping all the non-letters together. Make the text more realistic. For example, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 0123456789 !@#$%^&(),.{}<>/? is terrible. Much better is The (quick) brown {fox} jumps! over the $3,456.78 <lazy> #90 dog & duck/goose, as 12.5% of E-mail from aspammer@website.com is spam? This gives the textline finding code a much better chance of getting sensible baseline metrics for the special characters.
- It is ABSOLUTELY VITAL to space out the text a bit when printing, so up the inter-character and inter-line spacing in your word processor. Not spacing text out sufficiently will cause "FAILURE! box overlaps no blobs or blobs in multiple rows" errors during tr file generation, which leads to FATALITY - 0 labelled samples of "x", which leads to "Error: X classes in inttemp while unicharset contains Y unichars" and you can't use your nice new data files. This situation will improve in the future, as we are working on a solution, but for 3.00 APPLY_BOXES errors remain the most problematic difficulty for people training tesseract.
- The training data should be grouped by font. Ideally, all samples of a single font should go in a single tiff file, but this may be multi-page tiff (if you have libtiff or leptonica installed), so the total training data in a single font may be many pages and many 10s of thousands of characters, allowing training for large-character-set languages.
- There is no need to train with multiple sizes. 10 point will do. (An exception to this is very small text. If you want to recognize text with an x-height smaller than about 15 pixels, you should either train it specifically or scale your images before trying to recognize them.)
- DO NOT MIX FONTS IN AN IMAGE FILE (In a single .tr file to be precise.) This will cause features to be dropped at clustering, which leads to recognition errors.
- The example boxtiff files on the downloads page will help if you are not sure how to format your training data.
Next print and scan (or use some electronic rendering method) to create an image of your training page. Upto 32 training files can be used (of multiple pages). It is best to create a mix of fonts and styles (but in separate files), including italic and bold.
NOTE: training from real images is actually quite hard, due to the spacing-out requirements. This will be improved in a future release. For now it is much easier if you can print/scan your own training text.
You will also need to save your training text as a UTF-8 text file for use in the next step where you have to insert the codes into another file.
Clarification for large amounts of training data The 32 images limit is for the number of FONTS. Each font should be put in a single multi-page tiff (only if you are using libtiff!) and the box file can be modified to specify the page number for each character after the coordinates. Thus an arbitrarily large amount of training data may be created for any given font, allowing training for large character-set languages. An alternative to multi-page tiffs is to create many single-page tiffs for a single font, and then you must cat together the tr files for each font into several single-font tr files. In any case, the input tr files to mftraining must each contain a single font.
Make Box Files
For the next step below, Tesseract needs a 'box' file to go with each training image. The box file is a text file that lists the characters in the training image, in order, one per line, with the coordinates of the bounding box around the image. Tesseract 3.0 has a mode in which it will output a text file of the required format, but if the character set is different to its current training, it will naturally have the text incorrect. So the key process here is to manually edit the file to put the correct characters in it.
Run Tesseract on each of your training images using this command line:
tesseract [lang].[fontname].exp[num].tif [lang].[fontname].exp[num] batch.nochop makebox
e.g.
tesseract eng.timesitalic.exp0.tif eng.timesitalic.exp0 batch.nochop makebox
Now the hard part. You have to edit the file [lang].[fontname].exp[num].box and put the UTF-8 codes for each character in the file at the start of each line, in place of the incorrect character put there by Tesseract. Example: The distribution includes an image eurotext.tif. Running the above command produces a text file that includes the following lines (lines 141-154):
s 734 494 751 519 0 p 753 486 776 518 0 r 779 494 796 518 0 i 799 494 810 527 0 n 814 494 837 518 0 g 839 485 862 518 0 t 865 492 878 521 0 u 101 453 122 484 0 b 126 453 146 486 0 e 149 452 168 477 0 r 172 453 187 476 0 d 211 451 232 484 0 e 236 451 255 475 0 n 259 452 281 475 0
Since Tesseract was run in English mode, it does not correctly recognize the umlaut. This character needs to be corrected using a suitable editor. An editor that understands UTF-8 should be used for this purpose. HTML editors are usually a good choice. (Mozilla on linux allows you to edit utf8 text files directly from the browser. Firefox and IE do not let you do this. MS Word is very good at handling different text encodings, and Notepad++ is another editor that understands UTF-8.) Linux and Windows both have a character map that can be used for copying characters that cannot be typed. In this case the u needs to be changed to ü.
In theory, each line in the box file should represent one of the characters from your training file, but if you have a horizontally broken character, such as the lower double quote „ it will probably have 2 boxes that need to be merged!
Example: lines 116-129:
D 101 504 131 535 0 e 135 502 154 528 0 r 158 503 173 526 0 , 197 498 206 510 0 , 206 497 214 509 0 s 220 501 236 526 0 c 239 501 258 525 0 h 262 502 284 534 0 n 288 501 310 525 0 e 313 500 332 524 0 l 336 501 347 534 0 l 352 500 363 532 0 e 367 499 386 524 0 ” 389 520 407 532 0
As you can see, the low double quote character has been expressed as two single commas. The bounding boxes must be merged as follows:
- First number (left) take the minimum of the two lines (197)
- Second number (bottom) take the minimum of the two lines (497)
- Third number (right) take the maximum of the two lines (214)
- Fourth number (top) take the maximum of the two lines (510)
This gives:
D 101 504 131 535 0 e 135 502 154 528 0 r 158 503 173 526 0 „ 197 497 214 510 0 s 220 501 236 526 0 c 239 501 258 525 0 h 262 502 284 534 0 n 288 501 310 525 0 e 313 500 332 524 0 l 336 501 347 534 0 l 352 500 363 532 0 e 367 499 386 524 0 ” 389 520 407 532 0
If you didn't successfully space out the characters on the training image, some may have been joined into a single box. In this case, you can either remake the images with better spacing and start again, or if the pair is common, put both characters at the start of the line, leaving the bounding box to represent them both. (As of 3.00, there is a limit of 24 bytes for the description of a "character". This will allow you between 6 and 24 unicodes to describe the character, depending on where your codes sit in the unicode set. If anyone hits this limit, please file an issue describing your situation.)
Note that the coordinate system used in the box file has (0,0) at the bottom-left.
The last number on each line is the page number (0-based) of that character in the multi-page tiff file.
If you have an editor that understands UTF-8, this process will be a lot easier than if it doesn't, as each UTF-8 character has upto 4 bytes to code it, and dumb editors will show you all the bytes separately.
Box File Editors
There are several visual tools for editing box file:
| Name | Last update | Language | 3.00 box file support |
| jTessBoxEditor | Apr 2011 | Java | yes |
| QT Box Editor | Apr 2011 | C++, Qt4 | yes |
| moshPyTT | Feb 2011 | Python, GTK2 | yes |
| pytesseracttrainer | Jan 2011 | Python, GTK2 | yes |
| cowboxer | Jan 2011 | C++, Qt4 | yes |
| Tesseract-OCR boxfile AJAX editor | Sep 2010 | online tool | no |
| owlboxer | Jul 2010 | C++, Qt4 | no |
| Tessboxer | Jun 2009 | .NET | no |
| boxfilereader.php | Mar 2009 | php | no |
| tessboxes | Nov 2008 | C | no |
| JTesseract | Oct 2008 | C# | no |
| wx-tetra | Sep 2008 | perl, wx | no |
| bbtesseract | Jul 2008 | VB.NET 2008 | no |
Platform support depends on used language.
Bootstrapping a new character set
If you are trying to train a new character set, it is a good idea to put in the effort on a single font to get one good box file, run the rest of the training process, and then use Tesseract in your new language to make the rest of the box files as follows:
tesseract [lang].[fontname].exp[num].tif [lang].[fontname].exp[num] -l yournewlanguage batch.nochop makebox
This should make the 2nd box file easier to make, as there is a good chance that Tesseract will recognize most of the text correctly. You can always iterate this sequence adding more fonts to he training set (i.e. to the command line of mfTraining and cnTraining below) as you make them, but note that there is no incremental training mode that allows you to add new training data to existing sets. This means that each time you run mfTraining and cnTraining you are making new data files from scratch from the tr files you give on the command line, and these programs cannot take an existing intproto/pffmtable/normproto and add to them directly.
Tif/Box pairs provided!
Some Tif/Box file pairs are on the downloads page. (Note the tiff files are G4 compressed to save space, so you will have to have libtiff or uncompress them first). You could follow the following process to make better training data for your own language or subset of an existing language, or add different characters/shapes to an existing language:
- Filter the box files, keeping lines for only the characters you want.
- Run tesseract for training (below).
- Cat the .tr files from multiple languages for each font to get the character set that you want and add the .tr files from your own fonts or characters.
- Cat the filtered box files in an identical way to the .tr files for handing off to unicharset_extractor.
- Run the rest of the training process.
Run Tesseract for Training
For each of your training image, boxfile pairs, run Tesseract in training mode:
tesseract [lang].[fontname].exp[num].tif [lang].[fontname].exp[num] nobatch box.train
or
tesseract [lang].[fontname].exp[num].tif [lang].[fontname].exp[num] nobatch box.train.stderr
NOTE that although tesseract requires language data to be present for this step, the language data is not used, so English will do, whatever language you are training.
The first form sends all the errors to tesseract.log (on all platforms) like it did on windows versions 2.03 and below. With box.train.stderr, all errors are sent to stderr, on all platforms, just like it did on non-windows platforms for versions 2.03 and below.
Note that the box filename must match the tif filename, including the path, or Tesseract won't find it. The output of this step is fontfile.tr which contains the features of each character of the training page. [lang].[fontname].exp[num].txt will also be written with a single newline and no text.
Important Check for errors in the output from apply_box. If there are FATALITIES reported, then there is no point continuing with the training process until you fix the box file. The new box.train.stderr config file makes is easier to choose the location of the output. A FATALITY usually indicates that this step failed to find any training samples of one of the characters listed in your box file. Either the coordinates are wrong, or there is something wrong with the image of the character concerned. If there is no workable sample of a character, it can't be recognized, and the generated inttemp file won't match the unicharset file later and Tesseract will abort.
Another error that can occur that is also fatal and needs attention is an error about "Box file format error on line n". If preceded by "Bad utf-8 char..." then the utf-8 codes are incorrect and need to be fixed. The error "utf-8 string too long..." indicates that you have exceeded the 24 byte limit on a character description. If you need a description longer than 24 bytes, please file an issue.
There is no need to edit the content of the [lang].[fontname].exp[num].tr file. The font name inside it need not be set. For the curious, here is some information on the format:
Every character in the box file has a corresponding set of entries in the .tr file (in order) like this UnknownFont <utf8 code(s)> 2 mf <number of features> x y length dir 0 0 ... (there are a set of these determined by <number of features> above) cn 1 ypos length x2ndmoment y2ndmoment The mf features are polygon segments of the outline normalized to the 1st and 2nd moments. x= x position [-0.5.0.5] y = y position [-0.25, 0.75] length is the length of the polygon segment [0,1.0] dir is the direction of the segment [0,1.0] The cn feature is to correct for the moment normalization to distinguish position and size (eg c vs C and , vs ')
Compute the Character Set
Tesseract needs to know the set of possible characters it can output. To generate the unicharset data file, use the unicharset_extractor program on the box files generated above:
unicharset_extractor lang.fontname.exp0.box lang.fontname.exp1.box ...
Tesseract needs to have access to character properties isalpha, isdigit, isupper, islower, ispunctuation. This data must be encoded in the unicharset data file. Each line of this file corresponds to one character. The character in UTF-8 is followed by a hexadecimal number representing a binary mask that encodes the properties. Each bit corresponds to a property. If the bit is set to 1, it means that the property is true. The bit ordering is (from least significant bit to most significant bit): isalpha, islower, isupper, isdigit.
Example:
- ';' is an punctuation character. Its properties are thus represented by the binary number 10000 (10 in hexadecimal).
- 'b' is an alphabetic character and a lower case character. Its properties are thus represented by the binary number 00011 (3 in hexadecimal).
- 'W' is an alphabetic character and an upper case character. Its properties are thus represented by the binary number 00101 (5 in hexadecimal).
- '7' is just a digit. Its properties are thus represented by the binary number 01000 (8 in hexadecimal).
- '=' does is not punctuation not digit or alphabetic character. Its properties are thus represented by the binary number 00000 (0 in hexadecimal).
; 10 Common 46 b 3 Latin 59 W 5 Latin 40 7 8 Common 66 = 0 Common 93
Japan or Chinees alphabetic character properties are represented by the binary number 00001 (1 in hexadecimal).
If your system supports the wctype functions, these values will be set automatically by unicharset_extractor and there is no need to edit the unicharset file. On some older systems (eg Windows 95), the unicharset file must be edited by hand to add these property description codes.
NOTE The unicharset file must be regenerated whenever inttemp, normproto and pffmtable are generated (i.e. they must all be recreated when the box file is changed) as they have to be in sync. This is made easier than in previous versions by running unicharset_extractor before mftraining and cntraining, and giving the unicharset to mftraining.
Last two columns represent type of script (Latin, Common, Greek, Cyrillic, Han, null) and id code of character given language.
font_properties (new in 3.01)
A new requirement for training in 3.01 is a font_properties file. The purpose of this file is to provide font style information that will appear in the output when the font is recognized. The font_properties file is a text file specified by the -F filename option to mftraining.
Each line of the font_properties file is formatted as follows:
<fontname> <italic> <bold> <fixed> <serif> <fraktur>
where <fontname> is a string naming the font (no spaces allowed!), and <italic>, <bold>, <fixed>, <serif> and <fraktur> are all simple 0 or 1 flags indicating whether the font has the named property.
When running mftraining, each .tr filename must match an entry in the font_properties file, or mftraining will abort. At some point, possibly before the release of 3.01, this matching requirement is likely to shift to the font name in the .tr file itself. The name of the .tr file may be either fontname.tr or [lang].[fontname].exp[num].tr.
Example:
font_properties file:
timesitalic 1 0 0 1 0
mftraining -F font_properties -U unicharset timesitalic.tr
or, alternatively
mftraining -F font_properties -U unicharset -O eng.unicharset eng.timesitalic.exp0.tr
Clustering
When the character features of all the training pages have been extracted, we need to cluster them to create the prototypes. The character shape features can be clustered using the mftraining and cntraining programs:
mftraining -F font_properties -U unicharset -O lang.unicharset lang.fontname.exp0.tr lang.fontname.exp1.tr ...
The -U file is the unicharset generated by unicharset_extractor above, and lang.unicharset is the output unicharset that will be given to combine_tessdata. Mftraining will output two other data files: inttemp (the shape prototypes) and pffmtable (the number of expected features for each character). (A third file called Microfeat is also written by this program, but it is not used.)
cntraining lang.fontname.exp0.tr lang.fontname.exp1.tr ...
This will output the normproto data file (the character normalization sensitivity prototypes).
Dictionary Data (Optional)
Tesseract uses up to 5 dictionary files for each language. Four of the files are coded as a Directed Acyclic Word Graph (DAWG), and the other is a plain UTF-8 text file. To make the DAWG dictionary files, you first need a wordlist for your language. The wordlist is formatted as a UTF-8 text file with one word per line. Split the wordlist into two sets: the frequent words, and the rest of the words, and then use wordlist2dawg to make the DAWG files:
wordlist2dawg frequent_words_list lang.freq-dawg lang.unicharset wordlist2dawg words_list lang.word-dawg lang.unicharset
NOTE: wordlists must contain at least one word! Files are allowed to not exist in the combined traineddata file though.
If words always have some punctuation in them, like google.com then it is a good idea to include them in the dictionary.
TODO: add information on punc-dawg and number-dawg.
The 5th dictionary file is called user-words and is usually empty.
The last file (unicharambigs)
The final data file that Tesseract uses is called unicharambigs. It represents the intrinsic ambiguity between characters or sets of characters, and is currently entirely manually generated. To understand the file format, look at the following example:
v1 2 ' ' 1 " 1 1 m 2 r n 0 3 i i i 1 m 0 2 ಕೊ 6 1 ಕೋ 1
The first line is a version identifier. The remaining lines consist of 5 tab-separated fields. The first field is the number of strings in the second field. The 3rd field is the number of strings in the 4th field, and the 5th field is a type indicator. The 2nd and 4th fields consist of a number of space-separated strings. As with the other files, this is a UTF-8 format file, and therefore each string is a UTF-8 string. Each of these strings must match the first field of some line in the unicharset file, ie it must a recognizable unit.
The substitution rule is that the concatenation of the strings in the 2nd field is always replaced by the concatenation of the strings in the 4th field if the 5th field is 1. If the 5th field is a 0, then the substitution is not necessarily made. Instead it acts as a hint that if the substitution turns a word from a non-dictionary word into a dictionary word, that the word should not be used to train the adaptive classifier, and the segmentation search should pursue the possibility that the 4th field is a better interpretation of the word. The main impact of lines with a zero 5th field is to reduce mis-adaption, and it is not used as a strong hint to make the substitution.
Thus the first line shows a double quote (") should be substituted whenever 2 consecutive single quotes (') are seen. (The 5th field indicates that this is a mandatory substitution.) The 2nd line indicates that the pair 'rn' may sometimes be recognized incorrectly as 'm'. The 3rd line shows that the character 'm' may sometimes be recognized incorrectly as the sequence 'iii'. The 4th line indicates that the Kannada syllable 'ಕೋ' is often misrecognized as the syllable 'ಕೊ' followed by a digit '6' and the latter sequence is so unlikely that the substitution should always be made. Last line should be empty line ('\n').
Note that the characters on both sides should occur in unicharset. This file cannot be used to translate characters from one set to another.
The unicharambigs file may also be empty or non-existent.
Putting it all together
That is all there is to it! All you need to do now is collect together all (normproto, Microfeat, inttemp, pffmtable) the files and rename them with a lang. prefix, where lang is the 3-letter code for your language taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-2_codes and then run combine_tessdata on them as follows:
combine_tessdata lang.
NOTE: Don't forget dot at the end!
The resulting lang.traineddata goes in your tessdata directory. Tesseract can then recognize text in your language (in theory) with the following:
tesseract image.tif output -l lang
(Actually, you can use any string you like for the language code, but if you want anybody else to be able to use it easily, ISO 639 is the way to go.)
The following comment from combine_tessdata.cpp gives its options in more detail:
// To combine all the individual tessdata components (unicharset, DAWGs, // classifier templates, ambiguities, language configs) located at, say, // /home/$USER/temp/eng.* run: // // combine_tessdata /home/$USER/temp/eng. // // The result will be a combined tessdata file /home/$USER/temp/eng.traineddata // // Specify option -e if you would like to extract individual components // from a combined traineddata file. For example, to extract language config // file and the unicharset from tessdata/eng.traineddata run: // // combine_tessdata -e tessdata/eng.traineddata // /home/$USER/temp/eng.config /home/$USER/temp/eng.unicharset // // The desired config file and unicharset will be written to // /home/$USER/temp/eng.config /home/$USER/temp/eng.unicharset // // Specify option -o to overwrite individual components of the given // [lang].traineddata file. For example, to overwrite language config // and unichar ambiguities files in tessdata/eng.traineddata use: // // combine_tessdata -o tessdata/eng.traineddata // /home/$USER/temp/eng.config /home/$USER/temp/eng.unicharambigs // // As a result, tessdata/eng.traineddata will contain the new language config // and unichar ambigs, plus all the original DAWGs, classifier teamples, etc. // // Note: the file names of the files to extract to and to overwrite from should // have the appropriate file suffixes (extensions) indicating their tessdata // component type (.unicharset for the unicharset, .unicharambigs for unichar // ambigs, etc). See k*FileSuffix variable in ccutil/tessdatamanager.h. // // Specify option -u to unpack all the components to the specified path: // // combine_tessdata -u tessdata/eng.traineddata /home/$USER/temp/eng. // // This will create /home/$USER/temp/eng.* files with individual tessdata // components from tessdata/eng.traineddata. //
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