Training Tesseract 3 to recognize numbers from real images of gas meters

Question

I\'m trying to train tesseract to recognize numbers from real images of gas meters.

The images that I use for training are made with a camera, for this reason there are

Answer 1

I would try this simple ImageMagick command first:

 convert          \
    original.jpg  \
   -threshold 50% \
    result.jpg

(Play a bit with the 50% parameter -- try with smaller and higher values...)

Thresholding basically leaves over only 2 values, zero or maximum, for each color channel. Values below the threshold get set to 0, values above it get set to 255 (or 65535 if working at 16-bit depth).

Depending on your original.jpg, you may have a OCR-able, working, very high contrast image as a result.