Extracting lines from an image to feed to OCR - Tesseract

Question

I was watching this talk from pycon http://youtu.be/B1d9dpqBDVA?t=15m34s around the 15:33 mark the speaker talks about extracting lines from an image (receipt) and then feeding

Answer 1

Direct answer: you extract lines from an image with Hough Transform. You can find an analytical guide here. Text lines can be detected as well. Karlphillip's answer is based on Hough Transform too.