**Last Update**: 26.05.2024 *** - Tess4J is a Java JNA wrapper for Tesseract OCR API - Tesseract is an excellent open-source tool for character recognition, but direct usage in Java can require a lot of setup. By using Tess4J, you can access Tesseract's capabilities with simple Java calls. - The Tesseract class in Tess4J are not designed to be thread-safe. This means that you should not use the same instance of this class simultaneously from multiple threads. ```java import net.sourceforge.tess4j.*; public class Example { public static void main(String[] args) { File imageFile = new File("myimage.png"); // replace this with your image ITesseract instance = new Tesseract(); // JNA Interface Mapping instance.setDatapath("tessdata"); // path to tessdata directory try { String result = instance.doOCR(imageFile); System.out.println(result); } catch (TesseractException e) { System.err.println(e.getMessage()); } } } ``` > [!NOTE] > Note that using Tesseract and Tess4J requires you to have the [Tesseract OCR engine installed on your machine](https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Installation.html). Since Tess4J is just a wrapper around this engine, it won't work without it. In a practical scenario, you can use it to recognize and decipher CAPTCHA images, which are often used for testing whether the user is human. [Here](https://github.com/ehayik/web-scraping-kata/blob/master/src/main/java/org/github/ehayik/kata/webscraping/technicalreview/CaptchaWidget.java) is a link to a code example using Selenium WebDriver. > [!WARNING] > However, always remember to respect CAPTCHAs -- they are in place for a reason. Please do not use Tess4J or any OCR software to attempt to bypass them. *** **References**: - [Tess4J](https://github.com/nguyenq/tess4j) - [Tesseract OCR](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract) - [Optical Character Recognition with Tesseract](https://www.baeldung.com/java-ocr-tesseract)