The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a well known and widely used technology to recognize and read text from images and scanned documents. In the OCR operation, the characters on the images are scanned, recognized, and converted into the digital form. The converted text can be validated and saved to perform further operations. In this article, I’ll show you how to perform OCR to convert images to text programmatically using C# within your .NET applications. The rest of the article is divided into the following sections.
- C# OCR Library – Installation
- Convert Image to Text using C# OCR API
- Perform OCR on Images having Single Line of Text
C# OCR Library – Installation
Aspose.OCR for .NET is a powerful OCR library that lets you scan and convert images to text quite easily. It doesn’t require lengthy codes to get the OCR features up and running within your .NET applications. The following are the installation methods of the C# OCR Library.
Install via NuGet Package Manager
Simply search for Aspose.OCR in NuGet Package Manager and install it.
Install via Package Manager Console
The following is the command to install Aspose.OCR via Package Manager Console.
PM> Install-Package Aspose.OCRConvert Image to Text using C# OCR API
Let’s see how to perform OCR on an image that could possibly be a page of a scanned document. The following are the steps to perform this operation.
- Create an instance of the AsposeOcr class.
- Call AsposeOcr.RecognizeImage(string) method by passing the image’s path and get the result into a string object.
The following code sample shows how to convert an image to text using C#.
Perform OCR on Image with a Single Line of Text
In the previous example, we have performed OCR on the image which contained multiple lines of text. However, it is possible that the image contains only a single line of text. In such cases, you can tell the API to recognize the line only. The following are the steps to perform convert an image containing a single line text.
- Create an object of the AsposeOcr class.
- Call AsposeOcr.RecognizeLine(string) method and pass to it the path of the image file.
- Get the result into a string object.
The following code sample shows how to perform OCR and convert an image containing a single line of text using C#.
Perform OCR for Non-English Characters
Aspose.OCR doesn’t limit the OCR features for the English language and you can recognize the characters of other languages as well. The recognition process and the code will remain the same regardless of the text’s language. The following is the set of characters that can be recognized by the Aspose’s OCR API.
| space | ! | “ | # | $ | % | & | ‘ | ( | ) |
| * | + | , | – | . | / | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | : | ; | < | = |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| > | ? | @ | [ | \ | ] | _ | ` | { | | |
| } | ~ | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H |
| I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R |
| S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | a | b |
| c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l |
| m | n | o | p | q | r | s | t | u | v |
| w | x | y | z | Â | À | Á | Ã | Ä | Æ |
| Ç | È | É | Ê | Ë | Ì | Í | Î | Ï | Ñ |
| Ò | Ó | Ô | Õ | Ö | Ù | Ú | Û | Ü | ẞ |
| ß | à | á | â | ã | ä | æ | ç | è | é |
| ê | ë | ì | í | î | ï | ñ | ò | ó | ô |
| õ | ö | ù | ú | û | ü | ÿ | Œ | œ | Ÿ |
Conclusion
This article demonstrated how to perform OCR and convert images to text programmatically using C#. You can recognize the characters in the images containing single or multiple lines of text. Learn more about the C# OCR API from the documentation.
