Read the text on an Image

Sometimes in web applications we come across with pages which are loaded with images with text on it. In these scenarios we cannot read the text inside the image with the normal Xpath selectors. Xpath will only help to locate where the image is actually. So to sort out this scenario we have a special class in java called  OCR (Optical Character Recognition) which does the work for us. 

To start off with OCR first you need to follow some steps. 

1. Download "Asprise OCR" libraries , depending on the operating system you are using .
2. Unzip the downloaded  folder and add the "aspriseOCR.jar" file to your working directory . If you want you can download the single jar file from here.
3. Set the path in environments variables My Computer --> Properties --> Advanced system settings --> environment Variables --> Create a new system variable as below.

   4. And now you are good to go 

Look at below image 

now you can just get this same code and try your self 

import java.awt.Image;  

import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;  

import java.awt.image.RenderedImage;  

import java.io.File;  

import java.io.IOException;  

import java.net.URL;  

import javax.imageio.ImageIO;  

import org.openqa.selenium.By;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;  

import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;  

import org.testng.annotations.BeforeTest;  

import org.testng.annotations.Test;  

import com.asprise.util.ocr.OCR;  

public class Test2 {

//Read text values on an image 

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

//Creates an object from WebDriver 

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

//Calls the URL

driver.get("http://anjiztechshare.blogspot.com/2013/11/read-text-on-image.html");  

 

//Locate the image and get the image scr attribute values and assigns to a variable 

String imageUrl=driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@id='post-body-8001467531740453328']/div[4]/div[7]/a/img")).getAttribute("src"); 

//Prints the assigned variable values 

System.out.println("Image source path : \n"+ imageUrl); 

 

Thread.sleep(3000);

 

//Creates a new object from URL class and pass the variable as a parameter 

URL url = new URL(imageUrl);  

//Read the URl value 

Image image = ImageIO.read(url);  

 

//Creates a String variable to assign the values read by the OCR()

String s = new OCR().recognizeCharacters((RenderedImage) image);  

//Prints the text on the image line by line 

System.out.println("Text From Image : \n"+ s);  

 

//Prints the length of the image 

System.out.println("Length of total text : \n"+ s.length());  

driver.quit(); 

 

}

}

Here is the output of the program 

Image source path : 

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioEQTjbpO6sn0p9vr7xJupgPuYllrM6ePy8Jii8w1Qzp5B_28MJOr-quBowTghGDqCD2kCQUgQxCWB2KM0Li5FhsHZ16SqNir1L423weXHswI1Inkg_GKgxljeyAC_hyQMx0ZPTt94hpPN/s320/love.jpg

Text From Image : 

Never M2suse the O, ne

Who Likes You

Never Say Busy To Th,e One

Who Needs You

Never cheat The One

Who ReaZZy Trust You,

Never foJnget The One

Who Zways Remember You.

Length of total text : 

175

Now lets see how we can read an image from the hard drive and prints the letters in it. please read my next blog post.  Good luck for now.