converting png to tiff and character recognition with tesseract

His,

Trying to have tesseract (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/) read text from the tiff image (converted from a png image source either with imageio in Linux or Image Converter .EXE in Windows). The outputted text is empty or looks like \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\HHHHHHHHHHHH\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\UU\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\H\W

Does anyone have an idea what can cause the problem. I could imagine it is related with low contrast between yellow background and text or some type of attribute that one needs to set when converting from png.

next image

Denis Wen wrote:next image

Having a bit of experience with image processing (though not much with OCR), I would imagine that it's easier to perform OCR on a black-and-white image than on a colored image. If the images you need to work with are essentially bi-colored like the one shown above, converting it to B/W should not be hard to do, and may yield better results.

Ok, I should try that. What's the best way to grayscale an image you would suggest? with ImageIO somehow?

Ulf Dittmer wrote:Having a bit of experience with image processing (though not much with OCR), I would imagine that it's easier to perform OCR on a black-and-white image than on a colored image. If the images you need to work with are essentially bi-colored like the one shown above, converting it to B/W should not be hard to do, and may yield better results.

This may give you some ideas: http://blog.codebeach.com/2008/03/convert-color-image-to-gray-scale-image.html