Python OCR Module in Linux?

You can just wrap tesseract in a function:

import osimport tempfileimport subprocessdef ocr(path):    temp = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(delete=False)    process = subprocess.Popen(['tesseract', path, temp.name], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)    process.communicate()    with open(temp.name + '.txt', 'r') as handle:        contents = handle.read()    os.remove(temp.name + '.txt')    os.remove(temp.name)    return contents

If you want document segmentation and more advanced features, try out OCRopus.

In addition to Blender's answer, that just executs Tesseract executable, I would like to add that there exist other alternatives for OCR that can also be called as external process.

ABBYY comand line OCR utility: http://ocr4linux.com/en:start

It is not free, so worth to consider only if Tesseract accuracy is not good enough for your task, or you need more sophisticated layout analisys or you need to export PDF, Word and other files.

Update: here's comparison of ABBYY and tesseract accuracy: http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2010-06/15-linux_ocr_software_comparison

Disclaimer: I work for ABBYY

python tesseract

http://code.google.com/p/python-tesseract

import cv2.cv as cvimport tesseractapi = tesseract.TessBaseAPI()api.Init(".","eng",tesseract.OEM_DEFAULT)api.SetPageSegMode(tesseract.PSM_AUTO)image=cv.LoadImage("eurotext.jpg", cv.CV_LOAD_IMAGE_GRAYSCALE)tesseract.SetCvImage(image,api)text=api.GetUTF8Text()conf=api.MeanTextConf()