Pytesseract Image_to_string returns Windows Error: Access denied error in Python

Question

I tried to read the text from the image using Pytesseract.I am getting Access denied message when I run the below script.

     from PIL import Image
     import pytesseract
     import cv2
     import os

     filename=r'C:\Users\ychandra\Documents\teaching-text-structure-3-728.jpg'
     pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = r'C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\pytesseract'
     image=cv2.imread(filename)
     gray=cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)

     gray=cv2.threshold(gray,0,255,cv2.THRESH_BINARY|cv2.THRESH_OTSU)[1]
     gray=cv2.medianBlur(gray,3)

     filename='{}.png'.format(os.getpid())
     cv2.imwrite(filename,gray)

     text=pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open(filename))
     print text

     cv2.imshow("image",image)
     cv2.imshow("res",gray)
     cv2.waitKey(0)

when I run the script I am getting below Error

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "F:\opencv\New_folder_3\text_from_image.py", line 17, in <module>
text=pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open(filename))
    File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 122, in image_to_string
config=config)
    File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 46, in run_tesseract
    proc = subprocess.Popen(command, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    File "C:\Python27\lib\subprocess.py", line 390, in __init__
errread, errwrite)
    File "C:\Python27\lib\subprocess.py", line 640, in _execute_child
startupinfo)
    WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied 

Answer 1

Your code works except the setting of pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd. The tesseract_cmd should set to the tesseract executable file installed in your machine.

Here is a sample usage of it.

pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = "C:/Program Files/Tesseract 4.0.0/tesseract.exe"

The tesseract_cmd is required if no properly search PATH setup in your Windows PC.

Hope this help.

UPDATE:

You need to have tesseract binary installed into your PC before using pytesseract which uses subprocess module to run tesseract in Windows shell from Python.

Click this Tesseract 4.00 alpha to download a 64-bit Windows version and install it. Then setup the PATH and TESSDATA_PREFIX pointing to your tesseract.exe and ~\tessdata directory respectively.

If you need any other language trained data file, you can get it [here].

In case the ~\tessdata directory is not found in your Windows, you can create it manually and copy at least one traineddata file to there, such as eng.traineddata for English.

If tesseract is working, it will return the version information when you type tesseract -v in command prompt as below.