dreadlord1984 / open-ocr

Run your own OCR-as-a-Service using Tesseract and Docker

OpenOCR makes it simple to host your own OCR REST API.

The heavy lifting OCR work is handled by Tesseract OCR.

Docker is used to containerize the various components of the service.

Launching OpenOCR on Ubuntu 14.04

Install Docker

See Installing Docker on Ubuntu instructions.

Find out your host address

$ ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:43:40:c7
          inet addr:10.0.2.15  Bcast:10.0.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          ...

The ip address 10.0.2.15 will be used as the DOCKER_HOST env variable below.

Launch docker images

Here's how to launch the docker images needed for OpenOCR.

$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tleyden/open-ocr/master/launcher/launcher.sh
$ export DOCKER_HOST=10.0.2.15 RABBITMQ_PASS=supersecret2 HTTP_PORT=8080
$ chmod +x launcher.sh
$ ./launcher.sh

This will start three docker instances:

• RabbitMQ
• OpenOCR Worker
• OpenOCR HTTP API Server

You are now ready to decode images → text via your REST API.

Test the REST API

Request

$ curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"img_url":"http://bit.ly/ocrimage","engine":"tesseract"}' http://$DOCKER_HOST:$HTTP_PORT/ocr

Response

It will return the decoded text for the test image:

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Tue, 13 May 2014 16:18:50 GMT
< Content-Length: 283
< Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
<
You can create local variables for the pipelines within the template by
prefixing the variable name with a “$" sign. Variable names have to be
composed of alphanumeric characters and the underscore. In the example
below I have used a few variations that work for variable names.

Launching on a Docker PAAS

• Launch OpenOCR on Orchard

More coming soon ..

License

OpenOCR is Open Source and available under the Apache 2 License.