Compile tesseract4.1.1 in ubuntu16.04

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Download tesseract4.1.1 source code from git:

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/archive/4.1.1.tar.gz

Then express it into a folder, in general it will be tesseract-4.1.1.

Compile and install

Press Ctrl+Alt+T or press the right key of the mouse and select the 'open terminal at current folder" to open the terminal window. then input the commond:

bash autogen.sh

if the autogen is done successfully, the following message will be shown:

 ...
All done.
...

Then input command:

 ./configure

if the following message is shown:

 configure: error: Leptonica 1.74 or higher is required. Try to install libleptonica-dev package.

Then we have to install liblepleptonica-dev:

 sudo apt install libleptonica-dev

If no errors is shown, then it has been installed. So we configure again:

 ./configure

If the following messages were shown, it means that configure is successfully:

 Configuration is done.
 You can now build and install tesseract by running:

$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo ldconfig

Documentation will not be built because asciidoc or xsltproc is missing.

Training tools can be built and installed with:

$ make training
$ sudo make training-install

Then we can make and install the tesseract:

make -j8
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

If no errors were shown, then it should be installed successfully, so we can test it:

 tessract --version

If the following messages were shown:

tesseract: symbol lookup error: tesseract: undefined symbol: _ZN10SIMDDetect14avx_available_E

It means some libs is needed to install:

sudo apt install libtesseract-dev libleptonica-dev liblept5
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr -y

But the problem is still there, Then we have a look at the python3 version, we found that the python version is 3.6.3, maybe it is not new enough, so we install the python 3.7.6:

1) Download the python3.7.3 source code from: 
    https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.7.6/Python-3.7.6.tgz
2) Express it into a folder: Python-3.7.6
    open terminal window, and execute the command:
    ./configure
    make -j8
    sudo make install
    sudo ldconfig

 If no errors were shown, it means the python3.7.6 has been installed successfully. we can test it, input command in the command:
 python3.7
 then we should see the python3.7 version information, it means the python3.7 has been installed successfully.

Then we check the tesseract again, input the command in the terminal window:

tesseract --version

If the tesseract 4.1.1 information was shown, it means the tesseract4.1.1 has been installed sucessfully.

Download the newest and best tesseract lstm models from git and install them:

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata_best

We will get many ***traineddata file, we copy them into folder /usr/local/share/tessdata:

   sudo cp tessdata_best/*.traineddata /usr/local/share/tessdata

And let’s check if there are many files in the folder /usr/local/share/tessdata:

ls /usr/local/share/tessdata

If many *.traineddata files were shown, it means the models have been installed.

Install python pytesseract and pillow:

To use tesseract in python, we have to install pytesseract and pillow with pip:

sudo pip install Pillow
sudo pip3 install pytesseract

Install opencv module for python:

sudo pip install opencv-python

So, the tesseract4.1.1 and the best lstm language models have been installed, please start to enjoy your new journey!