pytesseract using tesseract 4.0 numbers only not working

Question

Any one tried to get numbers only calling the latest version of tesseract 4.0 in python?

The below worked in 3.05 but still returns characters in 4.0, I tried removing all config files but the digits file and still didn't work; any help would be great:

im is an image of a date, black text white background:

import pytesseract
im =  imageOfDate
im = pytesseract.image_to_string(im, config='outputbase digits')
print(im)

Answer 1

You can specify the numbers in the tessedit_char_whitelist as below as a config option.

ocr_result = pytesseract.image_to_string(image, lang='eng', boxes=False, \
           config='--psm 10 --oem 3 -c tessedit_char_whitelist=0123456789')

Hope this help.

Answer 2

Using tessedit_char_whitelist flags with pytesseract did not work for me. However, one workaround is to use a flag that works, which is config='digits':

import pytesseract
text = pytesseract.image_to_string(pixels, config='digits')

where pixels is a numpy array of your image (PIL image should also work). This should force your pytesseract into returning only digits. Now, to customize what it returns, find your digits configuration file, on Windows mine was located here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Tesseract-OCR\tessdata\configs

Open the digits file and add whatever characters you want. After saving and running pytesseract, it should return only those customized characters.