OCR (Tesseract)

Optical character recognition (OCR) functionality based on Tesseract via Intents

New in version 2.4

Target Android 15 (SDK 35), minimum Android 5 (SDK 21)
Upgrade Tesseract4Android to 4.7.0 (Tesseract 5.3.4)

This app bundles OCR functionality (based on Tesseract) that can be called from other apps via Intents. It listens for Intents with action "org.totschnig.ocr.action.RECOGNIZE" and expects an Uri pointing to a JPEG file as data. The recognized text is passed back in the extra "result" as an object of a parcelable data class Text, that must be copied into the client app.

This app is not intended to be useful stand-alone. It was created out of the motivation to not blow up the size of an application that makes use OCR for a feature that is not needed by all users. Currently it is used by My Expenses for scanning receipts.

Before you start using it, you need to configure the language that Tesseract should use, which triggers the download of the necessary trained models, hence the need for INTERNET permission.

Versions

Although APK downloads are available below to give you the choice, you should be aware that by installing that way you will not receive update notifications and it's a less secure way to download. We recommend that you install the F-Droid client and use that.

Download F-Droid

Version 2.4 (8) suggested Added on Nov 16, 2024

arm64-v8a armeabi-v7a x86 x86_64

This version requires Android 5.0 or newer.

It is built by F-Droid and guaranteed to correspond to this source tarball.
Permissions
- have full network access
  
  Allows the app to create network sockets and use custom network protocols. The browser and other applications provide means to send data to the internet, so this permission is not required to send data to the internet.
- read the contents of your shared storage
  
  Allows the app to read the contents of your shared storage.
  (9.0)
- org.totschnig.ocr.tesseract.DYNAMIC_RECEIVER_NOT_EXPORTED_PERMISSION
Download APK 13 MiB PGP Signature | Build Log
Version 2.3 (7) - Added on Apr 13, 2022

arm64-v8a armeabi-v7a x86 x86_64

This version requires Android 4.1 or newer.

It is built by F-Droid and guaranteed to correspond to this source tarball.
Permissions
- have full network access
  
  Allows the app to create network sockets and use custom network protocols. The browser and other applications provide means to send data to the internet, so this permission is not required to send data to the internet.
- read the contents of your shared storage
  
  Allows the app to read the contents of your shared storage.
Download APK 12 MiB PGP Signature | Build Log
Version 2.2 (6) - Added on Apr 11, 2021

arm64-v8a armeabi-v7a x86 x86_64

This version requires Android 4.1 or newer.

It is built by F-Droid and guaranteed to correspond to this source tarball.
Permissions
- have full network access
  
  Allows the app to create network sockets and use custom network protocols. The browser and other applications provide means to send data to the internet, so this permission is not required to send data to the internet.
- read the contents of your shared storage
  
  Allows the app to read the contents of your shared storage.
- modify or delete the contents of your shared storage
  
  Allows the app to write the contents of your shared storage.
Download APK 12 MiB PGP Signature | Build Log