Getting the bounding box of the recognized words using python-tesseract

Use pytesseract.image_to_data()

import pytesseract
from pytesseract import Output
import cv2
img = cv2.imread('image.jpg')

d = pytesseract.image_to_data(img, output_type=Output.DICT)
n_boxes = len(d['level'])
for i in range(n_boxes):
    (x, y, w, h) = (d['left'][i], d['top'][i], d['width'][i], d['height'][i])
    cv2.rectangle(img, (x, y), (x + w, y + h), (0, 255, 0), 2)

cv2.imshow('img', img)
cv2.waitKey(0)

Among the data returned by pytesseract.image_to_data():

  • left is the distance from the upper-left corner of the bounding box, to the left border of the image.
  • top is the distance from the upper-left corner of the bounding box, to the top border of the image.
  • width and height are the width and height of the bounding box.
  • conf is the model's confidence for the prediction for the word within that bounding box. If conf is -1, that means that the corresponding bounding box contains a block of text, rather than just a single word.

The bounding boxes returned by pytesseract.image_to_boxes() enclose letters so I believe pytesseract.image_to_data() is what you're looking for.


tesseract.GetBoxText() method returns the exact position of each character in an array.

Besides, there is a command line option tesseract test.jpg result hocr that will generate a result.html file with each recognized word's coordinates in it. But I'm not sure whether it can be called through python script.