Open Source Python OCR Software

Typeface from Ming Dynasty woodblock printed books. A Ming typeface. Extracted from Ming Dynasty woodblock printed books (凌閔刻本). Using semi-automatic computer vision and OCR. Open-source. A work in progress. Named in honor of 閔齊伋, a 16th-century printer. Intended to be used with Kenyan-lang, the Classical Chinese programming language. Download high-resolution PDFs and split pages into images. Manually lay a grid on top of each page to generate bounding boxes for characters (potentially replaceable by an automatic corner-detection algorithm). Generate a low-poly mask for each character on the grid, and save the thumbnails (using OpenCV). First, red channel is subtracted from the grayscale, in order to clean the annotations printed in red ink. Next, the image is thresholded and fed into the contour-tracing algorithm. A metric is then used to discard shapes that are unlikely to be part of the character in interest.