Using Win10 Built-in OCR
TLDR;
To get OCR in C# Console- Wpf- or WinForms-App:
- run on a modern Windows Version (e.g.: Win10)
- add nuget
UwpDesktop - add the following code:
var engine = OcrEngine.TryCreateFromLanguage(new Windows.Globalization.Language("en-US"));
string filePath = TestData.GetFilePath("testimage.png");
var file = await Windows.Storage.StorageFile.GetFileFromPathAsync(filePath);
var stream = await file.OpenAsync(Windows.Storage.FileAccessMode.Read);
var decoder = await Windows.Graphics.Imaging.BitmapDecoder.CreateAsync(stream);
var softwareBitmap = await decoder.GetSoftwareBitmapAsync();
var ocrResult = await engine.RecognizeAsync(softwareBitmap);
Console.WriteLine(ocrResult.Text);OCR Troubles
When UWP (=Universal Windows Platform) Apps were introduced, I was interested in what new APIs came with them. Soon the OcrEngine (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.media.ocr.ocrengine) peaked my interest, because it promised a simple and quick way to retrieve text from images.
A simple OcrEngine was something that I was looking for as the alternatives are big and cumbersome to use (I am looking at you Tesseract), discontinued (MODI; was included with Office), in the cloud and/or expensive.
Back then the problem was that you needed to create a UWP Application to access the UWP APIs, but at the same time an UWP Application was completely sandboxed! You couldn't even use any cross process communication (with the exception of using the cloud and a very basic file based approach).
That meant I couldn't use the OcrEngine in a WindowsService or WebService or even over a commandline!
So with that being the case, I put together a quick solution using Tesseract, but I never got around to tuning it and it never performed well.
UwpDesktop
Time went by and then the great Lucian Wischik (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/lucian) published the library uwp-desktop (https://github.com/ljw1004/uwp-desktop) as a nuget package called UwpDesktop.
This package made UWP APIs available to Applications based on the normal .NET Framework. When I read the announcement, I was instantly reminded of my previous failure to make use of the OcrEngine and finally today I took it out for a spin and it worked great!
Example Code
The following code reads in the supplied file and prints out the detected text:
var engine = OcrEngine.TryCreateFromLanguage(new Windows.Globalization.Language("en-US"));
string filePath = TestData.GetFilePath("testimage.png");
var file = await Windows.Storage.StorageFile.GetFileFromPathAsync(filePath);
var stream = await file.OpenAsync(Windows.Storage.FileAccessMode.Read);
var decoder = await Windows.Graphics.Imaging.BitmapDecoder.CreateAsync(stream);
var softwareBitmap = await decoder.GetSoftwareBitmapAsync();
var ocrResult = await engine.RecognizeAsync(softwareBitmap);
Console.WriteLine(ocrResult.Text);Example Application
I've put together a very simple example app and pushed it to github (https://github.com/8/ConsoleUwpOcr) that makes use of the OcrEngine.
Example Output:
ocr.exe ..\..\..\ConsoleUwpOcr.Test\TestData\testimage.png
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